Deputy Blaney has received permission to raise on the Adjournment the question of the non-supply of oil by a certain company to County Donegal, particularly to the remoter areas.
Adjournment Debate. - County Donegal Oil Supplies.
I am not disputing what the Chair has said or making little of the advantage I have in being given an opportunity to raise this matter but I should like to point out that I sought to raise this question as it relates to Donegal and other remote areas. My query was not confined to the misdeeds of one company although it concerns one company more than others. I make that statement for the purpose of the record because I am aware that the record of the Leas-Cheann Comhairle is slightly different.
I was reading from the paper in front of me.
I accept that. I want to bring this to the attention of the Minister in the hope that he can do something to relieve the situation of our people and retailers of petrol and oil. Some of those retailers in one company system have not received as much as one gallon of supply for five weeks. While this may be regarded as just hard luck in the case of the retailers who are solely supplied by the Burmah Oil Company, it is a scandalous system when the real picture is looked at because a number of those retailers depend for their livelihood on their service stations. They have not had any income for the past five weeks despite all sorts of promises and the allocation on paper of quotas for the months of April, May and June. However, those retailers have not received any supplies for April. The people of Donegal are left with a shortfall over and above any percentage cut that other companies may have applied. People throughout the country are mesmerised as to the Minister's indication some weeks back that the cuts amounted to approximately 5 per cent. Some companies are operating a 5 per cent cut, others a 10 per cent cut and others 20 per cent, but in the case of Burmah it is a 100 per cent cut in Donegal and other remote areas in the country.
The reason I mention Donegal and other remote areas is that these privately owned retail outlets supplied solely by the Burmah Company in the past received their supplies from Derry distributors on behalf of the Burmah Twenty-six County company. Over the years that has been useful for the Dublin company but the contracts held by all retailers south of the Border have been with the Dublin-based Burmah company although their supplies, for convenience, were distributed by the Belfast company through Derry. Normally when there was any shortfall in Derry, Belfast rowed in and made available the supplies but now Derry has not had any supplies to distribute to anybody in recent weeks and Belfast do not want to know anything about Donegal customers. At the same time Dublin, whose customers they are, do not want to know them either except to make promises on certain occasions. In fact, a specific date was given before Easter for the delivery of supplies and the making up of full April quotas on the arrival of a tanker in Derry on 19 April. That tanker had not arrived when I last had the opportunity of knowing what was going on up there.
The Minister should take into consideration that in Donegal and other western counties who are suffering in the same way other petrol companies are cutting supplies by up to 20 per cent in some cases. The result is that people living in those counties are not being treated uniformly in this critical time of shortage of supplies. That also applies to all other oil products. The Minister who has told the companies where he thinks they will have to get off—more power to him for doing this—must find a way to level out the supplies and if there is a shortage it should be borne by the entire community. It should not be borne in a haphazard way like the present system. He should also take into consideration families who depend entirely for their income on the sale of petroleum products. They have not had any business or income, or any promise of an income, because of the cessation of supplies by one company. This is a serious situation because those people have not had any assurance that the situation will change next week or next month.
The business and goodwill which such people have built up will disappear if they are not given supplies very soon. In my view the general run of petrol retailers have been given a raw deal in that they are being left to carry the can of the public ire because many people believe, spurred on by incomprehensible statements about supplies, that retailers have an endless storage capacity in the ground in which they are storing supplies in the hope of getting a rake-off. The Irish distribution centres of those multinational companies are probably not to blame because I doubt very much if they had any huge oversupply built up waiting for the price increase which they had hoped to get, or the one they got last week, to make their rake-off.
I believe it goes much further afield than that, and we are not talking in terms of a few hundred pounds, a tankful of petrol in a retail outlet, a few thousand pounds in the rake-off which might be taken from some of the distribution storage points around the country. We are really talking about the multi-nationals making millions overnight on oil that they probably have not yet got but have bought forward. This is the sort of racketeering I believe we are dealing with, and they are the sort of people we are dealing with. This is the sort of end product which I hope the Minister can do something about.
I am sure I have got across to the Minister a picture which he has been getting elsewhere. I appeal to him to do something, if he can. I feel that, if he can do something, he will. If there is anything the Minister can do, even if it is rough treatment for those people, let him speed it up because they deserve the roughest treatment: they are certainly not good friends of the country in relation to their behaviour.
I support Deputy Blaney in his request for an explanation from the Minister with regard to the reason for the unequal distribution of oil supplies throughout the country. Deputy Blaney referred to Donegal, which has been severely hit.
The question is about Donegal.
It is completely a Donegal question.
I have not strayed from Donegal. You are pre-empting my words.
The Deputy used the phrase "throughout the country".
I will stay strictly to the motion on the Adjournment. Deputy Blaney referred to the distress being caused in Donegal by what seems to be an unequal distribution of oil supplies, particularly petrol and diesel, throughout the country. When this crisis blew up about three weeks ago I felt that the intensity of it was the same in all parts of the Twenty-six Counties. In the last week it has become quite obvious that places furthest from the capital are suffering most. We would like an explanation for that. Are the oil companies favouring the environs of Dublin and the surrounding counties at the expense of the more remote regions?
Deputy Blaney mentioned the Burmah-Castrol company which seem to have gone almost out of existence as far as our oil supplies are concerned. Is it fair that people who have been customers of this company for years are now almost completely cut off from oil supplies? In the very remote regions they are almost without oil supplies. It is difficult in this time of scarcity for those people to turn to other suppliers and request them to give them supplies. Those companies, whether they are Shell, Texaco or other companies, have not sufficient supplies to meet the full demand of their own customers so they can hardly provide a supply for the Burmah customers.
We have heard various rumours why the Burmah company are unable to fulfill their commitments. I hope the Minister can give some explanation about the background of this. Is it entirely due to the troubles in Iran where this company seem to get most of their supplies? Is there some internal reason within the company's structure?
This is a very crucial time of the year for the farming industry. The Minister has repeatedly stated that the farming and fishing industries will be given priority when it comes to the supply of diesel oil. It was brought to my notice recently that people with large tracts of land awaiting cultivation cannot get supplies of diesel oil. I brought some of those cases to the Minister's office as late as today. We were told two weeks ago that this matter would be overcome, but this has not happened. There are thousands of acres of land all over the country where corn should be planted within the next week or so which cannot even be tilled. This is because there is a lack of uniformity, as stated by Deputy Blaney, in the distribution of existing diesel supplies.
The Minister told us at Question Time today that the oil installations have not got their normal supplies but he led us to believe that the supplies were not much below normal. What percentage cutback has there been in supplies? What hope has the Minister of improving the situation in the near future? I speak here tonight because of the critical situation in my constituency, which is one of the remote regions mentioned.
It is a long way from Donegal. We cannot discuss Waterford on this.
The Fianna Fáil dominated county council in Waterford yesterday deplored the present shortage which is severely affecting all strata of society. Working people cannot get to their places of employment; sporting fixtures and social occasions have to be abandoned because there are not sufficient petrol supplies to get the people to those centres. I appeal to the Minister to see that the distribution is uniform. It is obvious that there is not a fair distribution of the available supplies.
When Deputy Blaney gave notice today to raise the question of oil supplies in Donegal he mentioned one company in particular, but unfortunately it was not possible for my officials to find out the name of that company until 8.25 p.m.
I am sorry about that. The Minister could have had it sooner.
Perhaps they did not go the right way about finding it. I am in the difficulty that the Deputy mentioned Burmah in particular. As Burmah are one of the very small suppliers in Donegal most of the research done for the purposes of this debate was done in relation to the other companies, the larger ones, as Burmah are not a very significant force in the oil market in County Donegal. I have not as much information, therefore, as one might normally have in regard to that company in that area. I can say in general terms that the volume of complaints from Donegal, both before various steps were taken to rectify the problem that then existed and that have existed since then, is very small indeed.
There were complaints on behalf of two trawlers, temporarily based in Killybegs and which come from another part of the country that they were not getting supplies; it appears supplies were available there but that difficulty had to do with local patronage rather than a shortage of oil and the problem was sorted out eventually. Apart from the problem of those two trawlers, since the beginning of these difficulties the Department have received only three complaints in respect of Donegal. I venture to think that part of the reason for the small number of complaints may be that they could not get through to complain because they are more cut off than the rest of the country. Nevertheless, over a period of several weeks there have been only three complaints.
On checking today with the three main companies supplying Donegal, they have confirmed that in most cases they have had no complaints, and in others that they have had a very small number of complaints. I do not want to quibble with Deputy Blaney's assertion that some Burmah petrol stations in Donegal have not had any supplies for five weeks—I do not know if the Deputy's information is up to date—but it would seem that that is very unlikely to be the case.
I am absolutely certain that they did not get supplies for four weeks. Burmah's phone in Dublin still does not answer. That is a very bad sign.
The Burmah company have had particular difficulties. I do not want this House to discuss in any detail the commercial affairs of a private company for obvious reasons but, since the Deputies referred to them, I should make some reference to their special difficulties. In the past they got all their supplies from Burmah UK which has one refinery only at Ellesmere Port on Merseyside. Ellesmere Port was 100 per cent dependent on light Iranian crude. That refinery is not typical in the sense that the particular crude they are refining is principally crude which is used as a base for refining into lubricants. Burmah are associated with an oil, specifically lubricating oil, called Castrol which does a fairly large business in both Ireland and Britain. When their supplies of Iranian crude came to a stop earlier this year, they found themselves in much greater difficulty than any other company.
They were also at the disadvantage that they are much smaller than the other companies. They had not the international spread to enable them to look elsewhere easily and therefore have been worse hit than any other company in this country. I think it is correct to say that they were almost totally out of supplies; they were totally out of gas diesel oil and at one stage, had only something like one or two days of petrol.
I had discussions with their chief and senior executives and my officials had several discussions with them and we have been able to sort out most of the difficulties for their commercial customers. They were fairly significant suppliers to the agricultural market, road haulage and plant hire markets in Munster, for example, and we were able to get another company to supply those commercial customers. I am informed that Burmah had sufficient supplies for their priority customers over the past two weeks, either through direct imports or by the product swapping arrangement which they in common with other countries go on with and which is a help in terms of distribution.
That is why I am surprised at what Deputy Blaney had to say. I know he would not say it unless he believed it to be true, but what he says seems to be at variance with the information coming into the Department. Before Easter we were flooded with complaints which we did our best to sort out, and it was only when the order was made under the 1971 Act a few days before Easter that we succeeded in beginning to sort out these difficulties and in getting companies to make arrangements between one another. Since Easter there has been only a handful of complaints in the Department and the companies confirm that they are not getting any volume of complaints and that they are able to meet their priority customers.
There are non-priority customers whose needs for gas diesel oil at the moment probably cannot be met, and by this order they are precluded from being met until the priority customers' needs are met in full. I make no apology for that because it is the priority people who count. There is no great hardship involved for the non-priority people.
I would not agree with that. Would the Minister believe me when I tell him that there is less petrol in my part of the country than——
We are debating gas diesel oil in Donegal, not petrol in Waterford.
Obviously the Minister does not want to know about it.
There are no complaints about a lack of petrol and on the figures I cannot see that there ever was. Unfortunately, some weeks ago there was a panic situation where people were buying far in excess of their needs and were creating an artificial shortage.
We all agree with that. I am not——
I did not interrupt the Deputy.
The Deputy spoke about the petrol situation in Waterford which he should not have done because this is a Donegal question. The Minister to reply.
I put a question earlier.
I know, but your question is not being dealt with; we are dealing with Deputy Blaney's question.
On the question of Donegal, there was a problem caused temporarily through circumstances outside the control of everybody on this side of the Border due to the fact that two of the main companies in Donegal get their supplies from a depot in Derry. Apart from whatever problems they may have had in Derry, there was a strike of Northern customs officials on a number of days which resulted in tankers being sent back. This caused certain difficulties because the tankers were unable to go back to Donegal for several days. So far as any individual complaint is concerned, if Deputy Blaney gives my Department details of the retailers who allege that they have not got any supplies for five weeks——
Every station in Donegal is in a similar position.
——I will have them investigated. We have sorted out these problems in other places and I am confident we can sort them out in Donegal if the position is as stated by the Deputy.
The Dáil adjourned at 9 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 2 May 1979.