The new operator of Corrib Gas field has told investors it doesn’t expect to pay tax from profits on the project “for the foreseeable future”.

Last month, Shell Ireland disposed of its shareholding in the project to the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board in a deal worth just over €1bn.

IT was so easy for sacked Sunday Times columnist Kevin Myers to mock and defame the Corrib Gas protestors in article after article over the years. From his perch in his eyrie somewhere in the rolling hills of Kildare, he picked on the protestors again and again without properly informing himself of the protest’s deep community nuances, cynically dismissing genuine fears as ‘pagan voodoo of the fir-bolgs’.

Well, the Shell spin machine had ensured that official Ireland turned its back on this community, whose heritage and pristine environment is among the last bastions of a culture untainted by much of the consumerism and globalist capitalism that thousands of holiday makers who indulge in the area crave to  escape.