Proposing nuclear power hardly helps our argument over Sellafield

THE threat of nuclear power is looming over this country once again and it is coming, not from an unfriendly country, but from one of our own State agencies.

This week, Forfás put forward the suggestion that we should consider the nuclear option as a long-term solution to our dependence on oil.

By long-term, I suppose they mean once George W Bush has safely vacated the White House - otherwise the country might merit be inclusion in his ‘axis of evil’.

The suggestion was tucked into a report by the State enterprise agency which stated the obvious when it said that Ireland and the EU must develop an energy policy to meet the demand in the post-oil era.

It also pointed out that this country is the third highest consumer of the precious resource in the EU and production will peak sometime before 2030.

“Although not economically feasible in the short-to-medium term, Ireland should consider the possibility of developing nuclear energy as a more long-term solution,” said the report.

The report was full of enough facts and figures to scare the bejaysus out of you, especially if you had any ambition of hanging around this planet until 2030 and was still driving a 4x4 fuel-guzzler. It warned that this country was among the most sensitive to rising oil prices and, therefore, most vulnerable to a peak oil scenario.

You can see where Forfás is going. If people can’t be bothered about a diminishing oil resource, they will be concerned about a diminishing wallet.

We are undoubtedly over-dependent on oil, but nuclear power is not the answer. After decades of trying to get Sellafield closed, we would be defeating our own argument to build our own plant.

A country which cannot handle the technology of electronic voting is just not ready to handle nuclear power now, in the short-term or in the long-term.

So the Government should not go down the road of paying consultants to tell us what we already know.

What about the problems that nuclear power plants would cause us - such as security? I don’t think McDowell’s militia of reserve gardaí would be any great source of comfort in that direction.

Ironically, Carnsore Point, which was originally targeted as a nuclear site, is now a wind farm, owned by Hibernian Wind Power Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the ESB. Almost three years ago, Dermot Ahern, now our Foreign Minister, opened the Carnsore Point wind farm when he had responsibility for natural resources.

The 12MW wind farm, apparently, can generate enough energy to power something like 10,000 homes.

Nuclear plants were the furthest thing from Dermot Ahern’s mind on that occasion when he was spouting away about how it was the Government’s policy to produce 500MW of the country’s energy from renewable sources.

The way we were geographically situated in Europe, he said, Ireland was well-suited to renewable energy sources.

Referring to the proposal decades earlier to make Carnsore a nuclear site, the ESB chairman, Tadhg O’Donoghue, said it had gone the full circle.

“Mean to Green, if you like,” he said, and a lot of people liked.

All the circumstances that prompted the Government to think nuclear - a diminishing resource and projected exorbitant prices - are now present again.

When the 1973 oil crisis nearly had us sucking diesel, the then Government - a Fianna Fáil one - came up with a plan to build not one, but four nuclear stations. They were brooking no opposition to their plans and we would now be a nuclear country had the Government got its way.

A characteristic of that government, one inherited by the present one, was that it steadfastly refused to listen to public opinion. Such an attitude had the backing of one Dessie O’Malley, who was to become a founder of the Progressive Democrats.

The same Dessie O’Malley was the then energy minister who had called for an “informed debate”. His idea became clear at a Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis when he declared: “We don’t want members of the Flat Earth Society shooting off at a tangent”.

At another stage he threatened to call in the army to move what he called “20,000 hippies”.

DESSIE O’Malley and the Government did not reckon with the intensity of public opinion, fuelled largely, it must be admitted, by the trade union movement and environmental groups.

Aided and abetted by singers such as Christy Moore and Jackson Brown and even Chris de Burgh, a series of free concerts were staged at Carnsore Point called ‘Get To The Point’ and ‘Back To The Point’.

That opposition lasted for years until the Government eventually abandoned the idea.

People power won over nuclear power.

At the opening of the wind farm, Dermot Ahern referred to that remark and added: “Well, thanks be to God for the protesters.”

We can all say Amen to that.

But at the same time do not imagine that we are far removed from a time when the Government thinks it knows better than the people.

Whether the Government would ever re-visit the nuclear option has to be entertained, especially as this is a government that swears it believes everything America says about rendition flights by the CIA via Ireland.

This, despite the fact that it stubbornly refuses to investigate suspect flights using Shannon Airport. It now transpires that the CIA has used Dublin as well, according to Amnesty International.

Amnesty maintains, in its latest report, that more than 80 flights operated by the CIA passed through Irish airports in the last five years.

The human rights group has tracked 1,000 flights made by four civilian aircraft, which it claims were chartered by the CIA. It says they have passed through Shannon on 78 occasions since 2001.

The planes also used Dublin Airport three times in the same period and passed through Belfast and Derry airports five times.

Ireland has signed up to the International Convention on Human Rights and is a member of the Council of Europe. Consequently, there is an obligation on Ireland to do all in the nation’s power to ensure that prisoners are not being illegally transported through the State.

Ireland would appear to be a tool for the United States, a country which is paranoid about its own sovereignty but disregards that of other countries.

Apart from muttering inanely and incessantly that no public servants were in any way involved in any unlawful detention on Irish territory, our Government gives the CIA every latitude to do what it likes here.

It thinks that by saying it condemns the practice of extraordinary rendition that it will be believed.