Operation Baseline - Don’t count your chickens

One of the least attractive realities of capitalism — and nearly every other “ism” too — is that the monkey with the biggest stick usually gets all the coconuts. 

Or, to express that evolutionary and economic reality in more conventional terms: Power prevails. Another sometimes unattractive reality of our world is that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

With those two ideas to the forefront of our mind in an increasingly resource-scarce world it is to be welcomed that our Government is looking again, in the most particular and minute way, at what are now defined as our national waters to see if, in fact, any revision might include potentially oil and gas-rich Atlantic waters hitherto beyond our reach.

For the first time in almost six decades precise measurements of the country’s territorial waters, including sections of the disputed Rockall Bank, are being taken.

This “redefinition of territorial limits” has implications in the areas of exploration, licensing and law enforcement though if ever there was a case not to count your chickens before they hatch this may be it. It would take a lot more than moving a few lines on a map to make Ireland the Norway of the south.

Operation Baseline, as the project has been called, may be a welcome application of science to better define boundaries but it is hard to think that any enriching redefinition of our national boundaries would go unchallenged.