Retired teacher, Micheál Ó Seighin was reluctantly forced into the public spotlight when he was jailed in 2005 over flouting an injunction facilitating Shell’s development of the Corrib Gas project. Here he speaks exclusively to Áine Ryan as the gas is about to come on-stream.

AR It is almost 20 years since the Corrib Field was discovered in 1996. Can you bring us back to those early years and how you became involved in the debacle?
MOS I know now, as the rig workers did at the time, that the gas field to be called Corrib was well worth developing and would make money. My first introduction to it was an article by Mike Cunningham in the Western People in 1998 pointing out the potential for County Mayo in this new source of development a potential never to be realised.  At that stage Broadhaven Bay or its environs or other areas of European designation did not figure in the proposed development and I saw no significance in the moves by Coillte in the summer of 1999 to get legal title to its lands at Ballinaboy, the project’s refinery site. Nor, in 2000, was I aware of the flood of minor legislation passing through the Dáil to facilitate this project specifically.
In the early summer of 2000 and then in early autumn the ‘suits’ crowded into the area with models and scenarios and promising ‘goodies and pie in the sky’, buying pints etc. The Catholic Bishop of Kilalla and our local parish priest were charging around like harbingers of the Day of (good) Judgement; obviously we would never see a poor day again; but I personally was very aware of the limited short-time benefit accruing to any community from the extraction of raw materials. Still I was not concerned as I expected a project like that of Kinsale gas but my attitude changed when the [original] developer (Enterprise Oil) applied for planning permission in November 2000 and I saw what they intended to do to us, effectively to launch a heavy metals assault on us from land sea and air. That is how and why I became involved in objecting for the first time in my life.