Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

I will not waste any more time. The motion recognises that oil and gas are finite resources, and that the burning of oil and gas for energy is a crucial factor in global warming, a threat to our environment which nobody can ignore. Therefore, the motion calls for massive investment in alternative sources of energy, which this Government has been pathetically laggardly in doing over the past nine years.

The motion is based on the principle that while we are dependent on hydrocarbons and alternative sources are being investigated, the exploitation of those hydrocarbons should take place in such a way as to benefit the majority of the Irish people rather than feed the insatiable greed for profit from major transnational oil and gas corporations. It is undeniable that this Government, which claims to be in control of the State and is therefore charged with using the State's natural resources for the benefit of society, has a policy of abject capitulation to corporate interests and puts those resources exclusively in the hands of those corporate interests. It beggars belief that this Government hands control of all our gas and oil resources to the major corporations, with no independent assessment. It is entirely dependent for information on the amount of wealth there is in the major corporations who seek to exploit it. It is akin to the Garda Síochána asking a thief to put a valuation on the swag from his most recent burglary, but that is what the Government's hydrocarbon policy has been reduced to.

The greatest expertise of these corporations is not in recovering oil from Nigeria to Iraq and East Timor to South America, but in stealing the natural resources of indigenous people at huge cost to them. The Government is addicted to its subservience to big capitalist interests and, like most addicts, it denies it. The blustering denials of the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Deputy Dempsey in the House last night were an example of that, as he dripped with contempt for this motion, the fundamental principle of which is that resources should be recovered for the benefit of the people. As has been mentioned, this is a Minister who has monuments to him in every county in the State, not to his achievements but to his arrogance and incompetence, in the form of clapped-out electronic voting machines, mouldering in warehouses up and down the country to the value of €62 million of taxpayers' funds and a further €1 million in storage costs. The same Minister dared to come into the House last night and tell us that exploration for oil and gas wells by the State was not feasible because each well could cost €20 million. The people would infinitely prefer €60 million of their funds to be devoted to exploring for oil and gas, harvesting our natural resources, than rotting in warehouses around the country providing rental income for enterprising sheriffs and the returning officers who house them. We should alter the maxim "beat the swords into ploughshares", a very wise saying, to "beat the voting machines into oil exploration rigs" to bring natural resources ashore for the benefit of our people.

The billions of euro this Government has squandered in tax forgone to millionaire tax exiles, speculators and big corporate interests would have enabled all our offshore areas to be explored and hydrocarbons recovered. Instead we had to listen to the nihilism and pessimism of the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Deputy Dempsey, who trotted out argument after argument as to why it was not possible. He said that assembling the know-how, the machinery and the technology was too difficult. If his Fianna Fáil predecessors, though they were capitalist politicians, had followed those arguments 50, 60 or 70 years ago we would have had no electricity infrastructure in the State because that was what they had to do to harness that resource.

The spinelessness, cowardice and subservience to corporate interests of this Government are manifest, providing us with the grotesque spectacle of billionaire tax exile, the squire O'Reilly himself, speculating on frontier licences given to him by the Government, doing a deal with the corporate giant Exxon Mobil whereby he can sit on the Dunquin field without raising a finger. Exxon Mobil will incur all the costs but he will get 16% of the profits. The squire junior said they applied for the Dunquin licence in the belief that the geology indicated a very serious prospect. The Irish Government could and should have foreseen that.

It is ironic we are talking about the Dunquin field. I am sure the people of Dunquin and the former residents of the Blasket Islands will cast a wry eye over this, considering how Fianna Fáil sold them out in the 1950s. Yet again the area off the shore of the muintir an Bhlascaoid is the subject of a major sale. When I hear of frontier licences I reflect on how apt the term is. We usually associate the term "frontier" with the wild west. It is cowboys, political and corporate, who have been involved in these shabby deals to sell off our natural resources.

The Minister made a big deal last night of the onerous task these major corporations have in holding a frontier licence for 20 years. What do they have to do? They have to drill two wells in 20 years. They will buy up the area and stay there as long necessary to prevent anybody else from having it, while they exploit oil all over the world. Then they will drill in this area when it suits their corporate profitability requirements.

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