I move:
That Dail Eireann notes with grave concern the continuing and prospective shortages in oil supplies, and deplores the failure of the Government and of the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy to take early and effective steps to guarantee the maintenance of supplies to industry, agriculture, fishing, and socially essential services.
This story is one which has no scandals in it. There will be no shocking revelations in it. It is a very ordinary story. It is essentially one of neglect and inertia. It is a story to which the personality of the Minister—I do not mean the Minister of State, Deputy Burke, but Deputy O'Malley—adds the predictable dimension of human confrontation, bad temper and neurosis. These are the elements which cumulatively have left this country in a quite needless state of near panic in regard to oil supplies since the beginning or middle of March.
A large part of the case which not just I but most of the people will wish to make against the Government in this regard rests on the absolute predictability of the oil shortage, of the form it was going to take and the absolute possibility of taking adequate measures in time to avert scrambles, public disquiet, panic and perhaps damage to the economy of the kind it looked as though we were going to have when it was apprehended in March that there would not be enough gas diesel oil for the agricultural operations which rely so heavily on it in the early part of the season, and subsequently that there would not be enough petrol or diesel oil for the operations of the tourist industry later. That is something which is being seen only now.
I want to make it clear that this was predictable not just by me, not just by wiseacres who are saying after the event that they knew all along it was coming, it was predictable also for the Minister and his advisers. The other day I asked a question in regard to the technical periodicals which the Minister receives. I got an answer from him in which he revealed in tabular form a long list of periodicals to which his Department subscribed and which deal with energy and oil supplies. It was an impressive enough list, particularly when one has regard to the fact that the staff in the Department are small, actually smaller by one than two years ago, notwithstanding the very serious dimensions which the energy situation has developed in that time.
There were only two out of the list of about a dozen of which more than one copy was taken, but one periodical of which three copies were taken and which I can only suppose is a periodical which is read in several parts of the rather small section at the Minister's disposal, was the International Petroleum Times. In their issue of 15 January they sounded the absolutely clearest possible warning of the difficulties which were in store. They said:
The world was set for an oil crisis both of supply and price. We are going through the quite months again. We ignored all the signs that were flashing in 1973. We are probably making all the same mistakes again.
I do not want to read the whole article, but they pointed out that the Iranian exports which were in the course of completely dropping out, even though they had been decreasing during the period of strikes leading up to the exit of the Shah, accounted for almost 14½ per cent of crude oil in world trade terms. The article continued:
The further shortfall of 3 million b/d which has occurred since November cannot be made up from any other source and unless demand falls by a similar amount, a severe supply crisis will exist for as long as Iran is producing significantly less than those 3 million b/d.
There were tables in the periodical which showed the oil companies which were particularly dependent on Iranian supply. It showed that the Shell group relied on Iran for 18 per cent of their oil. That group account for a very heavy proportion of the Irish supply. The Burmah company relied for all of their oil on the Iranian supply and that supply has completely disappeared. That alone ought to have been enough to warn a Department and a Minister who were taking their responsibilities seriously what was coming.
A week earlier, on 6 January, The Economist, a general paper devoted to serious economic and political matters, warned:
The problems posed by Iran are cumulative. If it produces no oil from now until March, and stocks are run down companies will be hoping to make up during the summer, usually a slack time in the oil markets. If Iran is still producing only intermittently, or at low levels, the companies will find it difficult to rebuild their stocks to acceptable levels to meet next winter's demand which may be a per cent or two higher than it is this winter.
In a country like this, it will be more than that because of the low base from which our economic growth is starting.
So renewed trouble in Iran would put more serious pressure on supplies, weaken stocks further——
One of the most esoteric of all these journals, but which is on the Department's subscription list, is Petroleum Intelligence Weekly which strictly for-bids copies of itself to be made, referred to the International Energy Agency's optimistic forecast in their issue dated 5 February—still six weeks before anyone in Ireland began to get panicstricken, least of all the Department who, I believe, were exclusively relying on that forecast. The Petroleum Intelligence Weekly said:
IEA officials say the shortfall is "still far from 7%"....
Thus far, IEA has purposely avoided speculating about the possible duration of the Iranian oil cutoff and what to do if it continues beyond the winter.
The International Energy Agency forecast of about 5 per cent shortfall, I understand, was based on figures which they had collected some time around mid-December. In other words, at a time when the Minister should have been showing some activity—other than going to the United States on promotional tours on which he could have sent Deputy Burke or Deputy Geoghegan-Quinn—and asking if this shortfall prediction accurately reflected what was going to happen in this country because this was an overall shortfall in crude. It was not necessarily a shortfall which would turn out to be only 5 per cent in regard to the kinds of fuel on which our economy, apart from the generation of electricity by heavy residual oil, very heavily depends, in particular gas diesel oil and petrol. That was not necessarily going to be merely a 5 per cent shortfall, but when I found the Department and the Minister persistently saying that the shortfall would be only of that order, I had to come to the conclusion that they were taking the IEA figure and, with gross inexpertness and ignorance, applying that right across the board to various different forms of refined products. If they had been properly advised, they would not have been exposed to this.
The Economist on 10 February in an article entitled “The shadows of Iran are falling on the West” said that western Governments and oil companies were beginning to worry about oil stocks—“western Governments,” except the Fianna Fail Government in Merrion Street. They have other things to worry about—the Family Planning Bill, British policy on the North, the British Dimension, the Irish language as part of what we are, being able to speak three or four scraps of kitchen Irish, and how they were going to scrape an extra seat in the European elections. But the things that concerned the rest of mankind, like how they were going to keep their economies going on fuel and oil, heat their hospitals, keep traffic from seizing up, were of no concern to the Government. In fact, one would need to comb the February newspapers to find any reference of official concern with the oil situation. There were signs but they were not coming from the Government. There was the occasional complacent remark from the Minister of the sort we have heard before that we were moving into an era in which this finite resource would need to be husbanded and in which it would behove us to be economical with it, not to waste it and so on, but that was all. There were no measures intended to forestall or avert the consequences of the severe shortage which we had, and have. The Economist went on to say that the time to worry would be late next month—the end of March—when importing countries normally expect their stocks to start rising again through the spring and summer. That will be the time to worry. The only one worrying about it was Deputy Bruton in my party who was complaining that his farmers could not get diesel oil for their tractors. The only one on the Government side who really reacted was the Minister who said that people were being greedy and selfish in topping up unnecessarily and the Minister opposite who said that the oil companies were behaving like criminals. That the International Energy Agency, which is supposed to organise any share-out among 19 OECD members if there is a repeat of the 1973-1974 oil crisis, is complacent is the judgment of The Economist on 10 February. They are no more complacent than the Minister and his advisers, but the December information on stocks is rapidly becoming out of date. I quote:
When its governing council meet early next month——
that was in March
——to review the situation it will have more up-to-date (and perhaps more alarming) figures.
Those figures evidently did not penetrate to the Minister or to those whom he allows to advise him.
On the subject of the people who advise the Minister I want to say—and I intend no reflection on the official advisers whom the Minister has in his Department who naturally do their best with the material to hand and with the training which they have—there are very few of them. I got figures from the Minister the other day which showed that he had one person fewer in those sections of his Department than existed two years ago when the Department was in charge of Deputy P. Barry. He has no full-time non-civil servant consultants at all. He told me in reply to a supplementary question that he had some part-time consultants—or not even that but consultancy firms to which he had recourse occasionally. I asked him from this bench, "Did you ask them about the likely supply situation in March and April? Did you ask your consultants about that at the turn of the year?" There was no reply. I repeated the question and I was gonged out by the Chair. I would have thought that that was a harmless question which did not put the national welfare at risk or anything of that kind. Having been frustrated by a combination of the Minister and the Chair, I put down a question on the following morning for written reply today which I hoped to have by this evening, and I got it. I asked if the Minister would give the names of the outside consultant or consultants to whom he has occasional recourse on energy and on oil supply matters as stated by him in his reply to a Dail question on 2 May, the matters on which they have been consulted and the dates on which in respect of these matters their advice was sought. The answer I got an hour ago was this:
Since I have assumed responsibility for energy matters, consultants have been engaged in my Department to advise on a variety of subjects in the energy field including matters relating to coal, electricity, turf and petroleum. In view of the commercial and strategic considerations involved I am satisfied that it would not be in the public interest to give further information in respect of these studies.
I am not so dim as not to realise that there are conceivably strategic dimensions to energy even in a little country like this which is so holy and so above the common ruck of mankind that it feels it can sit on the fence and does not need to take sides in global conflicts or on issues which divide the rest of mankind. We have the attitude that we are far above the grimy little disputes between the free world and the communist world. We are very free to throw words like "fascist" and "communist" around when it suits us but we will not spend one penny to keep either of these forces of tyranny out of the way.
