Last evening the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy put out a statement which is only the latest chapter in an obscure little story which began as far as the public are concerned on 17 April last when The Irish Times under the following heading “Fish for Oil Deal by Lenihan with Norway” reported that the Government were offering Norway fishing facilities in exchange for a stake for Ireland's Aran oil company in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea. They said that the Minister for Fisheries and Forestry, Deputy Lenihan, was understood to have suggested in an exchange of letters with his Norwegian counterpart—note the circumstantiality of that—that Ireland was prepared to allow Norwegian fishing vessels to register under the Irish flag as part of such a deal.
On 23 April The Irish Times printed in a very different context part of a four-day marathon interview which their Olivia O'Leary conducted, apparently running between cumann meetings, the Dáil, his office and half way across the country and back, with the Minister for Fisheries and Forestry. She mentioned that a row had brewed up about this story and quotes the Minister as reacting as follows:
"Ryan had the information for a week," said Lenihan referring to Liam Ryan of the Irish Independent, who broke the story. “He tried to get at me but Dunlop fought him off over in the GIS and Neeson fought him off upstairs here. But it is just as well that it got out in the end”.
The day I saw the first report I put down a question to the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy. It was reached on 2 May about ten days after the Olivia O'Leary interview. In the course of the answer to the main question the Minister said:
Contacts which have taken place with Norwegian authorities concerning an application by an Irish company for an interest in a petroleum exploration licence offshore Norway have indicated that there appears to be scope for co-operation which could be of interest to Norway and, from the point of view of access to oil supplies, to Ireland. These contacts can best be described as being of a preliminary nature.
He was pressed in regard to whether fish figured in these discussions and he said:
I am not aware that one of my colleagues made that reference but in the course of our discussions with the Norwegian authorities the question of fish was discussed.
I asked:
Has the question of fishing boats been discussed in this setting as well?
Mr. O'Malley: Yes.
On 31 May I was in this House when the Minister for Fisheries and Forestry was answering questions from my colleague, Deputy Deasy. In connection with fish stocks in the North Sea, I asked if there was any truth in the reports which attributed some part to himself in the negotiations and approaches between our Government and Norwegians in regard to the possible exchange of an admission to our fishing waters in return for a stake in the Norwegian oil fields. I asked if the Minister had had no hand, act or part in those negotiations. The Minister replied:
I engaged in no negotiations in Oslo or Dublin or anywhere else, in regard to the matter mentioned by the Deputy.
Knowing the Minister for Fisheries and Forestry as most Members do, I repeated myself to get a simpler and straighter answer. I asked him again about the exchange of access to fishing waters for oil and he said:
There is absolutely no question of that. I cannot be more emphatic than that.
He went on to say that at all events he would be totally opposed to any such thing if it were ever suggested but it never had been.
On 12 June I asked what was the present status of the negotiations with Norwegian interests. The Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy referred me to the reply he had given on 2 May and indicated that contacts of a preliminary nature had taken place with Norwegian authorities and said:
There have been no developments in the matter since then.
I ask the house to judge how candid a reply that was when one week later it emerges, not spontaneously but because some journalist was intelligent enough to look closely at the accounts of a private company, that he had agreed with that company to take up, if he opted to do so, 51 per cent of a private enterprise in the event that the Norwegian Government give that private enterprise access to the Norwegian oil field. That was the first time that was mentioned. It was not spontaneously offered by the Minister any more than from first to last he made a spontaneous statement about this matter. All the information, and it is meagre enough, was extracted from him by dint of questioning. The first information was extracted only through a leak and even that they tried to sit on as the Minister for Fisheries and Forestry in an unguarded, but very characteristic, moment disclosed to Miss O'Leary.
A week later the Minister said in this House that there had not been any development since 2 May but we find they agreed to take up a 51 per cent interest in that private enterprise. Not only have they agreed to do so, but evidently that agreement was at all times there because the Minister said in his statement last night that the Government agreed to lend their support in connection with this application, the 51 per cent deal obviously being part of this, and following the agreement official representations were made to the appropriate authorities. We are only now hearing about this. What is the reason for this obsessive secrecy?
The sequence of events appears to have been as follows. First, an agreement between the Minister and Aran Energy Limited and, second, a joint approach to the Norwegians in which fish and fishing boats unquestionably were part of the deal. A fortnight after the Minister for Fisheries and Forestry had denied that he had any hand, act or part in the negotiations, on June 12, I asked the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy in which Department these contacts originated. He said:
In my Department and the Department of Fisheries and Forestry.
If fish was not part of the deal why would the Department of Fisheries and Forestry be involved? Why would anybody gratuitously bring the Minister for Fisheries and Forestry into any deal in which his presence was not officially a necessity? I do not know why the Minister for Fisheries and Forestry should be so shy about disclosing that he and his Department unquestionably played a part in these negotiations. I cannot guess the reason for that diffidence and lack of frankness.
It is disingenuous and less than frank of the Minister to have answered a question as recently as Tuesday of last week and not to have disclosed that this arrangement with the Aran company has been made. Any agreement which we can get with the Norwegians or anybody else which will guarantee a stable oil supply for this country is something that will have the unqualified support of this party and the same, I am sure, can be said about the Labour Party, but it is a pity that our first real chance of an independent oil supply should be characterised by this lack of frankness, candour and downright evasiveness. I cannot see why there was this diffidence and why two members of the Government should be in conflict about the part played by one of them in this chapter.
If that were all that were to it there would be no special need to say more except that it was a mysterious piece of obscurity. But there are two other factors I have to mention to the House. One of them bears on the national oil corporation which is a venture which the Minister has floated more than once. He has mentioned, both in the House and outside it at favourable conjunctures for himself, that he hoped to see a national oil corporation established. On the last occasion when he mentioned it he even went so far as to say that he expected to set up an ad hoc private company and give it a statutory basis later in the year.
Again, if there is a real role for an Irish national oil corporation and if it is not going to become simply another featherbed and another means of employing people behind desks and not, in the end, getting any expertise in the oil business which is what we are lamentably short of and if it will have access to real advice—and I mean instructed expert advice and not the sort of advice which the Minister has been getting for the last few months from people who are extremely competent in their own field but are simply out of their depth in the oil world—then by all means let us have a national oil company. But if we are going to have a nationalised state body bearing a title like that I would like to be told—and it is not the first time I have asked this question—why can this oil corporation not have a role to play in this Norwegian possibility?
I agree that corporations are as varied as people; we can have a corporation which has hardware and which carries on exploration and exploitation itself; we can have a distributing corporation; we can have a corporation which is merely a holding a company and so on. The Minister has been vague about what he has in mind in regard to a role for this corporation. Among other things I am inclined to suspect that the name itself is just a pretty toy which will provide an easy headline on a slack day, merely a toy like the Industrial Development Consortium which does not have an address or a telephone number, let alone a staff or a budget, or like the Employment Action Team which has been disbanded. It would not surprise me if the national oil corporation goes the same way because I am not yet convinced that there is a role for it. But if there is a role for it I want to know why the first serious enterprise of an independent kind which has ever been available to this State in the energy or oil fields should be evidently denied to this national oil corporation. Why is it that if we are going to have a national oil corporation the one thing it is not going to be allowed put its nose into is this Norwegian possibility? Surely this is, above all, the kind of thing it should get into and surely it should have a role there which need not be complicated by private enterprise.
The Minister knows that I am not a doctrinaire socialist and that no one else in this party is either. I am all for giving private enterprise its head where it will work. I am not in favour of subsidising private enterprise at the expense of the national asset. That is the reason why, when this oil story first broke, my first query was: what do the Government think they are about in handing out a national asset in the shape of access to fishing waters and fishing stocks in return for a benefit of which the prime recipient, the prime beneficiary is going to be Aran Energy and the gentlemen with money and expectations in that company? That was the prime question I was interested in to which I have not yet received an answer. It is curious that when we have, for the first time, a smell of a chance to have an oil supply of our own it is not the national oil corporation—which has been floated for an easy headline—which is envisaged as being the company to exploit it but a private company in which the State is taking a share for the purpose at least of this particular operation.
What kind of a private company is it? This is the note I want to end on and I am sure the Minister will be clicking his tongue at me for being so unworthy as to say things like this. This is not just any old company at all. Aran Energy—and there is no use in trying to blot it out—has got very substantial associations with the Fianna Fáil Party. I am not trying to allege that it is not possible to be as honest as the day is long and still be a member of or a supporter of or a contributor to or a hatchet man for the Fianna Fáil Party. It is possible. Those two things do not by any means exclude one another. I am making no allegations or insinuations of any kind and I do not want the Minister to suppose that I am. But when we find the State acquiring 51 per cent of the shares of this enterprise—and all they have got so far is an option to acquire and we are not told what the agreed price will be or what the terms are on which the acquisition is going to take place, and even if the Minister gives us some information now I am not going to regard it as satisfactory because I cannot reply after he sits down—and agreeing and binding themselves in certain events where the Norwegians, I suppose, will give a licence, to take up 51 per cent of this enterprise at an undisclosed price and on otherwise undisclosed conditions one has to look a bit more closely at the people who are involved. The people involved in Aran Energy are not all of the Fianna Fáil colour and the Minister can save himself the time of trotting out the names of people who are of my political colour because I know there are a couple of them in it, too.
