By:
Fintan O'Toole - Irish Times
Vindication of the protesters has created the opportunity to find a political solution, but the Minister is spurning it, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
YOU MAY have seen or heard reports that an explosion in a natural gas pipeline, so large that people thought it was an earthquake, killed five people in Connecticut the weekend before last. This was an obvious hoax. It could not have happened.
Natural gas pipelines are completely safe, and people who think otherwise are headbangers, cranks and subversives.
Last November, something interesting happened. It turned out that the headbangers of the Erris peninsula, the “extremists” who have been blocking the completion of Shell’s Corrib Gas project, were neither crazy nor extreme. An Bord Pleanála wrote to Shell’s planners, rejecting the proposed route for half of the gas pipeline, in terms that largely vindicated the protesters.