Brendan Ryan (Labour)

With regard to a matter raised by Senator Finucane, Coillte appears to believe that it is a private company and is entitled to withhold information on the basis of the legal position of a private company. Coillte is a publicly owned body, but there is well-documented evidence of it not answering queries because it states that it is a private company. The Minister of State may not be able to deal with this issue now but it deserves to be addressed. I ask the Minister to contact the body and remind the appropriate people who owns Coillte and to whom it is accountable, that is, the Irish people. I am increasingly sceptical of so-called good commercial reasons, as a number of the debacles that have occurred in this country in recent years with regard to cost overruns may not have happened if there was no initial insistence on non-disclosure of commercially sensitive information. We normally discover afterwards that commercial estimates may have been exaggerated. There should be more disclosure on Coillte's part.

Nobody looking from the outside could do anything but assume that the Government presumed that these five men would not stay in jail for 90 days. It is not a coincidence that within a week of the Dáil's resumption the men were out of prison. There is a degree of cynicism in the Government's attitude, which makes it difficult to now engender trust. Eloquent explanations will probably be received from the Government detailing how it was coincidental that a formula was found to free the people imprisoned for 94 days a week after the Dáil's resumption and just before a Dáil debate on the matter.

There is a huge issue in this matter regarding public policy and policies on exploration. I am astonished at the manner in which people forget. There was little exploration ongoing off the coast of Ireland in recent years and a need existed to encourage it. However, there was a stage up until about seven years ago where oil prices dropped as low as $10 a barrel. The bottom had dropped from the oil market and I read repeatedly in The Economist that OPEC was effectively a tool of the past and had no power in the market. Oil then hit $20, $30, $40, $50 and it is now hovering around $65 a barrel. No commentator can see any time in the immediate future when the price of oil will drop much below $60 a barrel for reasons such as reduced supply and rapidly escalating demand, especially in China and India. It has been stated before and although I may be wrong, I believe the days of cheap oil are over. The economic incentive to explore is now transformed. We would be foolish to use the instruments that may have been acceptable when oil was $10 a barrel to encourage exploration for our offshore resources when oil is reaching $65 a barrel.

Unfortunately, Ireland does not have the offshore resources that Norway has. However, it is worth comparing the strategies on offshore oil and energy resources of Norway and the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom had a good period while oil resources in the North Sea were plentiful, but it has not much to show for this, particularly in Scotland. On the other hand, Norway has developed a sophisticated response and has a €200 billion oil fund accumulated by the Norwegian Government to be used to fund economic growth into the indefinite future. The country did not embark on a spending or tax-cutting spree. Statoil was set up initially to deal with the country's own resources, and that company is now a major international player in the energy world, independent of whether the Norwegian North Sea resources are expended. It is worth comparing Scotland's benefits from the oil and gas off its coast and the benefits reaped by Norway from its resources.

I wish to spend a good deal of my remaining time on the precise issues that have caused such hurt and concern. On the first day I take first-year chemical engineering students in CIT, I ask them to work out for themselves what determines a piece of process equipment as being properly designed. I wish them to work out four factors from this. First, the equipment should technically work; second, it should be economically attractive; third, it should be safe; and fourth, it should be environmentally consistent with best environmental practice. Every chemical engineering faculty in the world is taught the factors that make up a good design. It is worth examining this project from such a perspective.

I am a non-Luddite who believes in progress, the value of industrialisation and the value of technology. I have always supported the development of the pharmaceutical and chemical industry in Cork and I believe it to be the wrong target for the green movement. A vast number of other industries in this country, including agriculture, have done far more environmental damage than the entire chemical, pharmaceutical and related industries. However, that is a separate issue. I wish to explain why valid technical reasons exist to be very wary of what is occurring, and I put them as valid questions rather than absolute obstacles.

I read the two quantified risk assessments available on the Department's website. I cannot recall whether there were two or three but I read two. The second one arrived at a number for the risk involved that was 40 times greater than the first one. Both risks were acceptably low by international standards in terms of what was practised internationally but the margin of difference was a factor of 40. That should set alarm bells ringing in that it suggests there is a huge number of judgmental issues involved where different experts can differ. If one is dealing with a project that will be confined within the boundaries of an industry and if two different experts within an industry say the risk is one in a million or one in 4 million, irrespective of what uncertainty there may be, those who make the judgment about the risk are those taking the risk.

What is happening in Mayo is that those who are making a judgment about whether the risk is acceptable are not those who will be at the receiving end if the judgment turns out to be wrong. That is where the uncertainty lies. Let me elaborate. If one is trying to sort out the scale of a risk one looks at two possibilities — how big the incident that might happen could be and what damage it could do. For example, if one installed a gas pipeline along O'Connell Street and there was a major explosion and a possible burn for 500 m or 600 m, thousands of people would die. Two issues arise. How likely is that to happen? We shall leave that issue for a minute because it is open to debate. Similarly, if an LP gas tanker going through O'Connell Street were to shatter under the worst possible circumstances hundreds of people would be killed because the scale would be enormous. As a result of good practice, this is extremely unlikely to happen. The two issues go together — how likely is something to happen and, if so, what will be its magnitude? Those two factors combine to give a number which is called the quantified risk. That is my simplified understanding of it and it is a reasonably correct one. This is the reason the pipeline is such a major concern in Mayo.

Suppose the same pipeline — assuming all the other numbers are correct — were to go down O'Connell Street or through a major built up area where 5,000 people live within a 500 m radius, the chances are that any serious incident, if it happened, would kill 5,000 people. What ultimately is being said in a quantified risk assessment is that the five or six people who live near the pipeline are an acceptable risk because there are only five or six of them. That is not fair particularly since the people who have been put at risk have no direct personal benefit from the pipeline. In this instance, five people decided they would not allow themselves to become the acceptable risk simply because of the small number involved.

The other issue is the project itself. The Minister of State said it is becoming common practice to place terminals onshore. I know the Minister of State well. He has never in his life uttered a word in the House that he does not believe is true.

If there is a body of practice on onshore terminals why could not the two companies carrying out quantified risk assessment find any historical evidence of the risk of a major fracture of that pipeline? They had to use analogy and similar projects within companies but they could not find a single similar project anywhere in the world which bore comparison to this one. How can that be if onshore terminals are now becoming common practice? The Minister of State should be careful not to believe what Shell tells him.

I have evidence of a quantified risk assessment carried out on Shell's behalf in Australia approximately five years ago in which there was a fundamental flaw in the design which was missed in the quantified risk assessment. Had the Government authorities in Australia not spotted the fundamental flaw an offshore rig would have been constructed and had an entirely predictable and likely event happened hundreds of people could have been killed. A quantified risk assessment is done on the data supplied by the client, in this case by Shell, and it is not independent. If there is to be a safety review, it is desperately important that the first brief of the company must be to know whether this is inherently safe or whether there are margins of uncertainty because it is a unique project. That is the concern of the people of Mayo, not that a 70 bar pipeline or a 120 bar pipeline will go through but that one that is designed to operate at 350 bar and which the consultants, who did the quantified risk assessment, recommended should be tested to 420 bar. That is an enormous pressure. I am not aware of a 420 bar pipeline having been used anywhere except within the confines of a sophisticated processing plant run exclusively and populated exclusively by trained personnel. The idea that one of those would run within 70 m of a person's home is not something I, as a confirmed technophile, find reassuring.