Fear in the Suir Valley
Some say it's the factory, some say it's not. But the animal deaths, the human illnesses, the rumours continue- and the fears. By Colm Toibin.
All along the valley people have noticed rust. Ray Foley, who lives next door to the Merck Sharp & Dohme factory in Ballydine, has noticed recently that metals seem to rust very quickly in the area around his house. John Hanrahan, on whose farm 114 cattle have died mysteriously in the past two and a half years, has a metal lamp which hung outside for nine months: one side is completely corroded, the other is unaffected. He says that the rusted side was the side which faced the Merck Sharp & Dohme factory in Ballydine, which is about a mile down the hill from his farm.
The metal sheet which covered the rainwater barrel in Tommy Rockett's yard, opposite John Hanrahan's farm, was there for years and there was no rust on it. Over the past two years it has corroded. Even Tommy Walshe, who lives five miles away from the factory on the Clonmel Side, says that he noticed rusting on an unusual scale.
The church in Ballyneale is less than a mile up the road from Hanrahan's farm. The church railings have corroded too, but only part of them. The other part, people have noticed, is given shelter by a house from the wind which blows from the factory; there is no rust on the sheltered railings. .
People say the factory is blamed for everything which goes wrong. If there's a sick child, it's the factory or if a farmer has problems, the factory is blamed. Or the rust on the railings of the church in Ballyneale. Some people blame John Hanrahan for working up feeling against the factory.
In the church in Ballyneale they have been saying a novena for Bertie Kennedy, whose doctor has told him that Lourdes might offer him more than any medical attention could. He is a popular man in the area, and the church was full on the nine nights of the novena.
Bertie Kennedy has cancer. Last year his wife thought he wasn't well. She made an appointment with the doctor for him on the last day of August 1982. The doctor told him he had cancer of the lungs. He didn't smoke or didn't drink and he had never been sick before. He is 37.
His problems started in 1981, when his cattle began to behave strangely: "I heard them in the barn one night and went out to see what was happening. When I went in they were holding their heads up and sniffmg the air. Then they all suddenly bolted down to the bottom of the shed and started to pile on top of each other. Three and four high they were. I've never seen anything like it before and I've been in Ballyneale for 27 years. One bullock got his back broken with all of them piling on top of one another.
The shed was 135 feet long and they all piled themselves into the top 15 feet."
The problems recurred the following winter. "These were different cattle in different sheds. They started to tremble and then bolted into the corner. They could be standing there looking like they were dead to the world and then they'd go all of a sudden. One day they were standing in the field and they started shaking and one bullock ran and they all bolted out of the field. But then they came back into the yard and gathered around me like flies."
In August 1982 Bertie Kennedy began to get pains in his chest and suffered from breathlessness. He had been kicked by a bullock earlier in the month and he put his trouble down to that.
He went to Dr Denis Flanagan in Carrick-on-Suir, and the following day he was sent to Galway for tests. In all he has been seen by six doctors. According to his wife, all the doctors have asked him where he came in contact with chemicals. Dr O'Halloran in Galway said that he had never seen that type of cancer before in a farmer, according to Mrs Kennedy. "The doctor in Galway under Dr Kniessey, Dr Kenelley, said that it had something to do with chemicals", Bertie Kennedy says. His wife says that Dr Flanagan in Carrick asked where her husband had come in contact with asbestos. None of the doctors will make any comment.
‘Im not blaming Merck Sharpe & Dohme for my illness', Bertie Kennedy says. "But I think it should definitely be monitored. I'd back any committee set up to investigate it”
At 1.45 on the morning of Sunday 10 April 1983 John Hanrahan made a telephone call to the home of J.P. O'Callaghan, the county engineer for South Tipperary. When O'Callaghan's wife answered the phone she asked Hanrahan why he always phoned at night to complain about the smell from the factory. He told her that emissions from the Merck Sharp & Dohme plant at Ballydine - emissions which he believes have killed 114 of his cattle over the past two and a half years - only came at night. There would be no point in complaining at any other time.
The following Wednesday David Mackey, the county secretary for South Tipperary, wrote to John Hanrahan. He reminded him of his phone call to the county engineer and claimed that there were no emissions from the factory on that night. And furthermore, he wrote, that Hanrahan couldn't have seen any because the factory wasn't in operation that night. And also the factory, on being notified by the county engineer, had inspected the area around Hanrahan's farm that night and had seen nothing. And anyway, wrote David Mackey, the wind was blowing in another direction.
John Hanrahan was not surprised that the Council thought he was imagining things. Nor was he surprised that they based their opinion entirely on facts provided by Merck Sharp & Dohme. ("I didn't even bother replying to the letter it was so foolish.") He talked about it with bitter incredulity, which is how he talks all the time about what is happening on his farm.
From the council's point of view Hanrahan's phone call was just another example of the man's unreliability. It confirmed his status as a crank.
John Hanrahan's mother inherited the farm in Ballydine, now 270 acres, from her uncles. Her mother's name was Mandeville and the Mandevilles have held land in the area for 700 years. The Hanrahans are, in the words of a neighbour, "real old gentry".
"Mrs Hanrahan was really the power behind the wheel", according to David Hurley, the former county agricultural officer, who first visited the farm in the early 1950s. "I would say that the mother was as good a farmer as there was in South Tipperary", he says. "Everything was done according to the best scientific advice. Mrs Hanrahan is a terrific manager."
John Hanrahan, his wife and their two children have moved out of Ballycurkeen House, which is now inhabited only by Mrs Hanrahan and her sister. They have moved to Piltown, about ten miles away. "When I think of the nights I spent lying in bed in that house rolling around looking for a breath of air", comments John's wife Selina. "If I had my life again I would run as soon as I saw that factory coming', she adds. They have moved to Piltown because they believe that the Merck Sharp & Dohme factory has adversely affected their health. The children's ponies and rabbits have all died in the past two years. The Hanrahans' dog died of cancer in August 1982. (Bertie Kennedy's dog died in the same month. "He just wasted away.")
All their neighbours agree that the cattle deaths on the Hanrahan's farm could not be due to bad farming. There is general agreement that the Hanrahans are excellent farmers; everyone we spoke to shared this view. David Hurley says it is a model farm.
John Hanrahan's reputation changes slightly as you move from Ballydine to Clonmel. Edwin Fitzgerald, the ITGWU official in Clonmel, laughs when he hears that John Hanrahan has health problems. He says that he might do better if he stopped drinking. Others, when asked, insist that John Hanrahan never takes more than one or two drinks. John Condon, the personnel manager of Merck Sharp & Dohme, doesn't want to comment on John Hanrahan's personality but he wonders why we should believe that all his cattle have died.
In Clonmel the view is that John Hanrahan is mad, that he's a lunatic. One official, who has visited the farm constantly over the past few years, says that "he wasn't a difficult man until he had a problem and he found that no one was going to help him". His neighbours, even those who are friends of the family, say that he's hot tempered, highly strung. Scientists who have visited the farm over extended periods have found him to be perfectly normal.
His mother has a reputation for being lucid, tough, dependable, solid. She makes no excuse for the family's unpopularity in the area: she says they never courted popularity, and they made sure that they never needed help from other farmers. Many of their neighbours say that if the problem had occurred on the same scale on another farm, the neighbours would have rallied around and the problems would have been solved. But not the Hanrahans.
In the County Council offices in Clonmel and in Merck Sharp & Dohme in Ballydine they will tell you the same story. The same story contains two truths which have taken the shape of precepts in the minds of the officials as though they had been brought down on tablets from Slievenamon. The first truth is that there are no unusual health problems in the Ballydine area, the second truth is that the animal problems are confined to John Hanrahan's farm.
Paddy O'Meara has a farm on the opposite side of the road to the Merck Sharp & Dohme factory in Ballydine In November 1981 he was visited by John Coffey of the Department of the Environment and J.P. O'Callaghan, the county engineer. He says that he gave them the same evidence as he gave Magill and they noted it down. In October 1982 he told Dr Walshe, deputy chief medical officer of the Department of Health, what happened to him. His neighbours have confirmed various parts of his story.
At five o'clock in the morning on the last Sunday of May 1981 O'Meara was in a field with his cattle and his sheep. The first thing he noticed was the cattle sniffing in the air. Then he noticed the sheep running up the field The air was thick with a kind of fog, he says. He had got a touch of the same thing the previous year.
This time he felt it in his chest. He says he could feel it burning him. That afternoon when he went back to the cattle, he says he felt weak and sore. "I went to bed early and woke up at three or four in the morning. 1 thought I was done. I couldn't draw breath." Because Monday was a bank holiday he waited until Tuesday to go to a doctor.
"He examined me up and down first. 'God', he said, I don't know what it is.' He said then: 'Where did you come in contact with poison? Your system is poison You're rotten with it', he said. I mentioned the factory in Ballydine. 'Oh bejaysus it is', he' said. I mentioned the factory in Ballydine and how the smell had burned me. 'Oh that's it', he said."
When O'Meara returned to Dr O'Callaghan in Clonmel later that week he was told he was slightly better. He made several other visits to the doctor. "The flesh melted off me. I was sick for two months. That was May. All June and all July I couldn't catch a bail of hay or anything. I lost weight. I got out of it gradually. But I was never the same since, though."
Dr O'Callaghan in Clonmel refuses to comment on this case.
According to Paddy O'Meara the cows which were in the field that day faded away. At the end of the year he sold them to a dealer for half their value. Of the 24 sheep which were in the field that day, all but two of them were barren the following year. He sold off the barren sheep. The cows which he has at the moment are still not thriving, but he has no interest in them any more.
"Trying to do anything about it is useless. I see Hanrahan across there trying to fight against them all and I say 'What's the use?' We got no hearing at any of the meetings. We just want a bit of clean air, that's all we want."
At the end of last October Paddy O'Meara put seventeen bullocks in a field opposite the factory. After two days they broke out. He found that they would not stay in the field. He had similar problems in 1981. "What ever it was in the grass the cattle wouldn't stop in the field", he says. Last October he put barbed wire up to keep them in the field. One of the animals tore its chest open while trying to get out of the field. Paddy O'Meara claims that the smell still comes from the factory. He has asked for monitors to be put on his land. This has not been done.
The County Council received the first complaint from John Hanrahan on 14 September 1978. He said that he himself had difficulty breathing. He also said that his cows' eyes were streaming. Complaints from John Hanrahan have persisted from then until now.
In 1979 the Council received different complaints from various people in the Ballydine area about bad smells. "Towards the end of 1979", says a Council spokesman, "we could see that Hanrahan himself seemed to have a problem which seemed to persist". In February 1980 the county manager decided to undertake an independent investigation and contacted An Foras Forbartha.
He asked them to conduct an investigation into pollution in the area around the Merck Sharp and Dohme factory in Ballydine. The factory had opened in 1976 and had expanded in 1978. In 1978 Merck began producing a drug called "sulindec" prescribed for the treatment of arthritis. A substance called "thioaniso1e", the "odour of which can be detected from very small amounts", according to John Condon of Merck, is emitted into the atmosphere during the manufacture of "sulindec".
In order to modify the waste treatment area, says John Condon, Merck had spent £200,000. He adds that they set up a monitoring system in 1979.
Dr Ian Jamieson began an investigation for An Foras Forbartha in May 1980. This investigation cost the County Council £2,000. The atmosphere in the vicinity of the factory was tested for various air pollutants.
The report, published in October 1980, found no evidence of serious air pollution and found that acid vapour emissions from the Merck Sharp & Dohme plant were within the proposed EEC health protection standards .
Dr Ian Jamieson recommended that further monitoring be carried out and that complaInts continue to be "regarded seriously and investigated". He also recommended that "selected persons" be given simple containers with which to obtain "grab" samples of the air. These containers operate in the same way as the normal aerosol spray but, on depression of the valve, air is drawn into the container.
The Ballydine farmers were never supplied with these. The Council met local residents to discuss this report on 18 December 1980. They agreed that further monitoring was needed. In the spring of 1981 the Council decided to commission another report from Ian Jamieson. The monitoring began again in April 1981 and continued until May 1982. This report cost £13,000.
The Council had a second meeting with the residents on 20 February 1981. The IFA was represented, the county agricultural officer Michael English was present as were the county manager and other local officials, including Willie Moloney, an official of the County Council, who has been involved with this problem since 1978.
It was suggested at this meeting that a special committee be set up of technical experts in the pollution, agricultural, medical, veterinary and other areas to sort out what the problem was. The county manager agreed to do this. Everybody left the meeting feeling that this would be done. It has never been done.
February 1981 was the month the problems started in earnest on John Hanrahan's farm. February was the month when he and his vet Tom de Lacy began to record the deaths of cattle. At first they thought it was just bad luck. but more and more they realised that there was something wrong. The cows had been stampeding and getting sick. their eyes were streaming.
They were going to send the records to Dublin but were advised to send them to the County Council. They sent them to the county manager. A few days later on 17 February, three days before the locals' meeting with the County Council, an inspector from the Tipperary Veterinary Office called and said the cows had brucellosis. Neither Hanrahan nor de Lacy had given any evidence that this was the case. Both were sure that this was not the case.
An inspector, Paddy Crowe, came from Kilkenny to see the animals. There was a greater incidence of twins than is normal, and calves were being born dead and deformed. The Hanrahans were watching the destruction of their dairy herd.
John Hanrahan sent part or whole carcasses of 26 cattle to the veterinary laboratory in Kilkenny. He got back reports to say they could find nothing. He asked if the lab had a list of chemicals to look for. The lab did not. Nor did the lab have facilities for testing cattle for toxic substances. These facilities are not available in this country. The Department of Agriculture usually sends such samples abroad for testing. But they did not send any samples abroad for testing from the Hanrahan farm in 1981. Nor in 1982.
In mid 1981 the Council asked one of its vets, Peter Dougan, to visit the farm and look at affected animals. He did this and he wrote a report for the Council. This report remains on file in the Council's offices. It has never been released or commented on.
67 cattle died on the Hanrahan farm in 1981. Tom de Lacy has records of 300 visits to the farm that year. In November Ian
Jamieson informed South Tipperary County Council that his findings seemed likely to confirm what he had found in his previous
report. He suggested a further study be done using other methods. The Council agreed, and in March 1981 the Trinity Report was
commissioned at a cost of £6,000.
In November 1981 John Coffey of the Department of the Environment and J.P. O'Callaghan, the county engineer, visited the area. They interviewed various farmers who felt they had been affected by the factory. These included Paddy O'Meara. John Coffey is reported to believe that there is no health problem in the area; he is also reported to believe that Merck Sharp & Dohme is not causing any of the problems in the area.
In January 1982 Tom de Lacy became seriously worried about the implications of what was happening on Hanrahan's farm. He believed, as he still does, that the problems were being caused by Merck Sharp & Dohme. On 18 January he wrote three letters - to the county manager, T.P. Rice, to the factory and to Dr de Souza, the county medical officer - to ask if they could inform him what substances Merck used.
On 1 February he received a reply from the county manager telling him to contact Merck Sharp & Dohme for the information. ("The information requested in your letter can best be obtained from Merck Sharp & Dohme .")
On 24 February Tom de Lacy received two replies to his letters of 18 January. One was from Merck Sharp & Dohme, who said they could not make any information available.
The other letter was from Dr de Souza, the county medical officer, who wrote: "I confirm that the management of Merck Sharp & Dohme have informed me that I am not at liberty to disclose confidential information which they have supplied to me."
Earlier in the month John Hanrahan had issued court proceedings against Merck Sharp & Dohme.
The following month was March and Fianna Fail were returned to power. John Hanrahan was in Dublin one day and happened to be in Buswells Hotel where he happened to see Brian Lenihan whom he approached and informed what was happening on his farm. Lenihan was at that time Minister for Agriculture. He urged Hanrahan to stay in Dublin overnight and come to his office in the morning. At the meeting the following morning there was a promise of a committee from the Departments of Health, Agriculture and Environment to be set up to investigate the problem.
This committee was never set up. However, in the past month there is evidence that an inter-departmental committee under the Department of Labour has been established to investigate the problem.
On 24 June 1982 Merck Sharp & Dohme invited some of the local residents into the plant and presented information on how the plant operated. Details were also furnished of donations which Merck Sharp & Dohme had given to various projects since 1976. These donations amounted to a quarter of a million pounds. The company estimated that it would give £70,000 in donations in 1982. The following have been among the recipients of money: Irish Heart Foundation (£50,000); St Vincents Hospital (£5,000); UCD (£10,000); Presentation Convent, Clonmel (£20,000); St Mary's School, Clonmel (£20,000); Loreto Convent School, Clonmel (£20,000); Kilcash, Kilshelin and Ballyneale National Schools (£2,000); Carrick-on-Suir Development Association (£5,000).
•
On 6 July 1982 the County Council held another meeting with local residents. John Hanrahan and his mother were excluded from this meeting on the orders of the county manager. Apparently, the county manager felt that, since the Hanrahans were sueing Merck Sharp & Dohme, they could not form part of the deputation to meet the Council.
Tom de Lacy, the Hanrahan's vet, however, attended the meeting and informed the Council that he and John Hanrahan believed they had definite information which would prove that Merck Sharp & Dohme were causing the deaths of John Hanrahan's cattle.
De Lacy refused to disclose what this information was.
The Council and the Department of Agriculture have sought this information since de Lacy's statement. The information in question is understood to have been commissioned by the Hanrahans from Rory Finegan, a Cork scientist, formerly based in Canada, now based in Tripoli. Hanrahan says he will release it in the High Court.
The following month Dr Ian Jamieson published the results of a further study, carried out between April 1981 and April 1982, of the air in the vicinity of the Merck Sharp & Dohme plant in Ballydine. He found that the acid vapour concentrations were within health protection standards, although during the summer of 1981 (when Hanrahan's problems were at their most severe) they were considered high for a rural area. The report stated: "It is considered that the relatively high acid concentrations were possibly due to emissions from chemical processes or the handling, transporting etc of acid substances in the factory."
Jamieson himself mentioned in the report that on two of his visits to Hanrahan's farm he had suffered from minor skin irritations and odours, which he said were not severe, with the exception of odours from thioanisole, which were "prolonged and very unpleasant".
Jamieson's main recommendations were that as a matter of urgency the animal health problems on Hanrahan's farm be fully investigated by veterinary and other appropriate authorities, and that the monitoring of emissions from the factory continue. He also stated that complaints should be properly recorded and monitored by the County Council and subjected to serious investigation. "Until an explanation for the health problems is found the possibility that some serious toxic substance, from whatever source, is responsible should not be ignored."
The monitoring of emissions from the factory did not continue.
Dr Jamieson has now been working on the problem in Ballydine for over two years. Dr Jamieson has been forbidden by South Tipperary County Council to speak to Magill. He is thus not in a position to confirm or deny reports that he is unhappy about what is happening in Ballydine and about the terms of reference he was given by the Council.
John Hanrahan did not receive a copy of Ian Jamieson's 1982 report. His vet, Tom de Lacy, however, managed to procure it through a contact. The same contact turned up trumps when the Trinity Report was presented to Tipperary County Council. Had his contact not given him the report it is unlikely that it would have seen the light of day.
The purpose of the Trinity College Botany Department study was to assess the impact of the factory's emissions on the surrounding countryside by examining leaf yeasts (which are particularly sensitive to air pollution), lichens grass, soil, silage and samples of animal hair.
From the leaf yeast study, the report deduced that certain locations in the area "are exposed to high pollution levels". The examination of grass and soil on Hanrahan's farm indicated a higher level of bromine and chlorine than would be expected, and the silage study showed that higher levels of bromine had been present during the summer of 1981.
On the basis of the lichen study, the report stated that: "evidence that chronic levels of pollution are present was derived from (a) observations of discolourations and algal overgrowth on some specimens, (b) high levels of some elements, especially sulphur in the lichen thalli. It is therefore expected that over the next few years the more pollution sensitive lichens will be killed." .
The report further stated: ''There was clear evidence ... that sulphur was being taken up by the lichens from the sulphur dioxide emissions of the Merck Sharp & Dohme factory."
The results of the animal hair studies showed a relatively high level of bromine and chlorine, particularly during the summer of 1981, and provided "circumstantial evidence. implicating a pollutant emitted by the Merck Sharp & Dohme factory during 1981."
The report stated that the area around Ballydine has suffered a decline in air quality as a result of the emissions from the Merck Sharp & Dohme factory, and recommended continuing study and more detailed analysis of the hair samples, lichens, grass and leaf yeasts.
It also recommended that as conifers are more sensitive to air pollution than broad-leafed trees, the conifers in Kilcash wood be surveyed, and that the nature and quantity of the chlorinated and brominated compounds in the factory be investigated.
Rumours were flying around about the Trinity Report and what it contained in the weeks before a meeting was held in John Hanrahan's house on 27 September 1982. The county medical officer told the meeting that he was unable to procure a copy. Mark Lynch from the Department of Agriculture, who was at Ballydine to produce a report, said he had been unable to get a copy.
When nobody was looking Tom de Lacy put the report on the table. When it was noticed there was consternation .
The following day J.P. O'Callaghan, the county engineer, and Mr Connolly, the assistant county manager, travelled, to Dublin where they had a meeting with the scientists who compiled the Trinity Report and Dr Ian Jamieson. It had originally been intended not to release the report but to incorporate its findings with those of Ian Jamieson.
Now they realised, however, that the report would have to be released, particularly since a copy had been received anonymously by the Irish Times. The representatives of the County Council wanted changes made in the report. They said that if it were released in full it would allow Merck Sharp & Dohme to take an action. In particular, they wanted Merck's name left out as much as possible.
At one stage local gardai mounted an investigation into who had leaked the report and who had put it on the table. Merck Sharp & Dohme still express great concern that the report was leaked.
One of the Trinity scientists comments: "A poten-tially serious air pollution problem exists in Ballydine because of the siting of the factory, because of the height of the stack and because of the nature of the process carried out in the factory." He continues: "If the effluent from the factory were nothing more than sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide there would be no worry, but if they contained unspecified substances obtained from processes involving chlorinated and brominated organic compounds - as they do - the potential exists for the release of toxic substances into the air which, because of the siting of the factory, might not be effectively dispersed. The prevailing wind is south-westerly, and what comes from the stack ends up on Hanrahan's farm."
The scientists all talk about inversion. Inversion is a meteorological situation which occurs in a valley where the air near the ground is cooler than the air above it and therefore it will tend to be trapped; it won't rise. The scientists claim that inversion exists in this valley.
"This could ruin the countrv". comments one scientist.
"It could ruin Ireland's beef and milk export trade. There has been enough about antibiotics in Irish products, let alone toxic chemicals. This could close down Irish agriculture overnight."
In the autumn of 1982 both the Department of Agriculture and Tipperary County Council produced their own separate interpretations of the various surveys and reports produced on pollution in the Ballydine area.
Some aspects of their interpretations were inaccurate.
Mark Lynch's report for the Department of Agriculture stated that the TCD study on lichens "does not indicate any pollution".
The TCD study stated that the lichen study had indicated "chronic levels of pollution".
J.P. O'Callaghan, the Tipperary county engineer, in his report for the County Council stated that " ... the lichen species in the Ballydine area are high pollution sensitive types which do not flourish in polluted areas". This is nowhere stated in the TCD report.
On the leaf yeast study undertaken by TCD, Mark Lynch states the following: "The data can be interpreted as indicative of airborne pollutants occuring over a wide area around Ballydine. This interpretation is untenable in the context of meteorological conditions if the Merck Sharp & Dohme plant is the source." None of the studies undertaken have stated this, and he gives no reasons whatsoever for his conclusion.
J.P. O'Callaghan for the County Council states that "the results of the Leaf Yeast counts ... do not purport to be scientifically accurate". At no stage in their report did the TCD scientists give any indication that this was the case. Quite the opposite. O'Callaghan gives no explanation for his assertion.
On the TCD animal hair studies, Mark Lynch for the Department of Agriculture states that: "The methodology used was deficient. No conclusions can be drawn." The conclusions of the TCD scientists were that these studies showed a high level of bromine and chlorine which reached a peak during the summer of 1981. Mark Lynch gives no reasons for his dismissal of the TCD animal hair studies.
As its conclusion on the animal hair study, the County Council report contents itself with merely quoting Mark Lynch's statement on the deficiency of the methodology.
The Department of Agriculture report suggested that no further money should be spent on monitoring the factory until further veterinary information could be obtained. Both the county engineer and the county manager agreed with this.
Tom de Lacy confirms that they have a private report which they will not give to the Council or the Departrnent.
He alleges "that the first place where this information would go, would be to the Merck Sharp & Dohme management". He also believes that the Council would sweep it under the table.
The Department of Agriculture has written to John Hanrahan promising absolute confidentiality if he will release information on the cause of his cattle's death, The Department says that it needs this information so that it knows what to look for in the cattle.
John Hanrahan refused to give this information to a number of vets who visited his farm on 25 January this year. Both the Council and Merck Sharp & Dohme are concerned that Hanrahan will not hand over this information. However, a senior official in CIonmel wonders why the Department, the factory and the Council are now complaining about Hanrahan's lack of co-operation "since they had access to everything they wanted for two fucking years and they didn't use it".
In October last year the IFA drew the attention of Charles Haughey, who was then Taoiseach, to what was happening on Hanrahan's farm. Haughey wanted to know if Merck Sharp & Dohme had ever admitted causing a problem.
Later that month, during the general election campaign, John Hanrahan went to see Michael Woods, then Minister for Health. He told him that a man in his early forties had died of a sudden heart attack. There had been a remarkable number of sudden deaths due to heart attacks along the river Suir near the factory. The following day was a Sunday and Michael Woods contacted Dr Jimmy Walshe, deputy chief medical officer in the Department of Health, and asked him to investigate the case immediately.
Dr Walshe drove down to Clonmel the following day and was in the office of the medical officer when John Hanrahan phoned to ask him why he hadn't turned up to the meeting in his house.
Dr Walshe had been told nothing about a meeting in Hanrahan's house. He found Hanrahan rude. However, he drove to Ballydine and found a roomful of local people at Hanrahan's house. He got the impression that they were frightened. They talked of sudden heart attacks, of cancer, of deafness among children. (Magill has investigated incidents of deafness among children and has found no evidence to connect this problem with the Merck factory.) He found the meeting very difficult.
"People were talking a lot of bloody-minded codology", he says. Paddy O'Meara mentioned that he had to sell his cattle and his sheep. Dr Walshe asked him if he was now breeding racehorses. Another man said that his health had been ruined by one whiff of the emission from the factory which had knocked him over. "You don't look too bad to me", Dr Walshe told him. The man's name was Gussie Lyons. He died suddenly in Clonmel on 21 March 1983. He died of a heart attack.
The Schering Plough controversy raged in the valley between Carrick-on-Suir and Clonmel from 1974 to 1976. Everybody remembers it and everybody still talks about it.
It was to be another chemical plant on the Clonmel side of Merck. "We had the experience of Merck (which was being built during this period) and we saw Merck was good and we thought Schering Plough would be another Merck", says Edwin Fitzgerald of the ITGWU. At first there were two hundred objectors to Schering Plough: bit by bit the number dwindled to eight.
One of the eight had his cows maliciously poisoned, others had their cows let out on the road. One found broken glass on his driveway, another's house was threatened by a mob. There was garda protection for some of them. Their children were threatened. At a meeting in Cahir with public representatives and local officials they were told that if they did not withdraw their protest they would be ostracised from the community.
They issued the following statement on 17 December 1975: "For the safety of our families and property we individually and collectively bow to the pressure of serious intimidation and threats of violence, which forces us to forego our constitutional rights as citizens of this country. In these circumstances we individually and collectively withdraw our objections to the proposed industry and will take no further action."
However, because of the delays and the protests Schering Plough decided not to build the plant at Clonmel. They moved the plant to Puerto Rico. The IDA warned that Ireland could not afford to have a bad label in international industrial circles. The objectors were called "cranks and publicity-seekers" in the Senate by James Tully, the then Minister for Local Government. They were also castigated by Noel Davern, Brendan Griffin and Michael Ferris.
The experience has left its mark on both sides. Some are sensitive that complaints about the Merck factory will put the jobs of the 250 workers there in jeopardy. Others are aware that if they complain about the factory they will be open to the treatment which was given to the earlier objectors. Several farmers mentioned to Magill that they could not comment on the problems in the area as they had been involved with the Schering Plough protest and did not want to go through the same experiences again.
There are many farmers around the Merck Sharp & Dohme plant in Ballydine who do not have any problems. Ray Foley lives next door to the plant; his farm stretches up the hill and adjoins John Hanrahan's land. There is just a road between the two farms. Ray Foley, who has a suckling herd and is thus in a position to observe cows over a period of years, has had no problems with his animals. His son often gets a headache when he works in certain fields, but headaches can be caused by anything, he says. But there are two things which might be caused by the factory: the problem with Mrs Foley's eyes and the rust around the house. Mrs Foley's eyes stream sometimes, and she has been to see young Dr O'Callaghan, the eye specialist in Clonmel. There are often smells from the factory, but everyone in the area gets those; John Condon of Merck Sharp & Dohme comments: "I don't think people expect us to be an odourless plant. We can't survive without making an odour."
Pat Walshe of Kilmurray owns the only other herd of cows in the area, aside from Foley and Hanrahan. His, like John Hanrahan's is a dairy herd. His fields adjoin Hanrahan's land for a length of 600 yards. His land, however, is in a dip, while Hanrahan's is on a hill. His land is further away from the factory than Hanrahan's.
The Walshes have had problems with their animals but they consider these problems to be due to normal causes. Their children have had problems due to ill health, but they believe that none of these problems can be blamed on the factory. Siobhan Walshe, Pat Walshe's Wife, comments:
"We are watching the whole time. We are concerned both for our children's health and our own health. We get the smell, but we can't say that we have had any problems. We can't honestly see anything wrong. We are keeping our eyes open."
Tommy Rockett has a farm opposite Hanrahan's land.
Last summer his cattle refused to eat the grass, but he says that the situation at the moment is not as bad as it was in 1981. In 1981 he says that the cattle had continuous coughing from April onwards. (This was also the time when Hanrahan experienced his most serious problems.) Rockett thinks that they were poisoned by the chemicals in the factory, but none died on his farm.
"They died in the meat factory, chemicals and all", he says.
He says that he would never leave a window open in his house.
John Callanan's farm is off the main road from Carrick and Clonmel. He talks about the emissions from the factory:
"It's like fallout from an atom bomb."
His cows had problems with internal bleeding and last spring they were fading away. His vet advised him to sell them to the meat factory, which he did. In 1980 his wife had a nose bleed which she couldn't stop. John Callanan says that other people in the area had nose bleeds at exactly the same time. He refuses to name these people.
The Widgers live about five miles on the Clonmel side of the factory:
"We get an awful tiredness. If the east wind blows up we get this awful tiredness."
For the past three or four years John Widger has got spasms of deafness, of which John Hanrahan has also complained.
John Widger was a butcher before he married into the farm. In 1981 they killed a sick yearling. John Widger says that he has "never seen anything like the state of it".
"In the spring of 1981 we had dreadful calving problems. We don't know if it's the factory," he says.
Out of 80 cows who calved that year they lost 20. The children had chest ailments. Last September the cattle had problems with their eyes running. John Widger says that he suspects that one cow they have is fading away.
"If I'd the money I'd look into it."
Up the river from Paddy O'Meara's are the Longs.
Michael Long doesn't believe that they have any problems which could be connected with John Hanrahan's problems. In 1980, however, there was an unusually high incidence of death among lambing sheep, for which there was no explanation. In 1981, the same year as Bertie Kennedy, John Hanrahan and Paddy O'Meara had problems with cattle and sheep stampeding, the Longs also had problems with cattle and sheep stampeding. Otherwise, they say, they had no problems.
Tommy Walshe, who lives five miles away, has no problems from the factory, he says, except the smell that sometimes seeps down the river. Himself and his wife also have problems with tiredness and have noticed rusting, but he is not sure that these can be ascribed to the factory; Paddy Stokes who lives near him says he has problems only with the smell.
There is no unusual human health problem in the area around the Merck Sharp & Dohme factory in Ballydine, according to the county medical officer Dr de Souza. "There doesn't seem to be any greater instance of illness than in any other part of the country", he says. He asked anyone who thought they had health problems which might be related to the factory to come forward. He has had six complaints, five of which he considers to be "of nuisance value". These involve running noses and watering eyes. One family has come forward with respiratory problems, but Dr de Souza has no evidence that these are caused by the Merck Sharp & Dohme factory.
Dr de Souza has asked all the doctors in the area if they have had any complaints which could be put down to Merck Sharp & Dohme. All of them have said no, according to Dr de Souza.
Dr Michael Carey is both the doctor for the factory and a local general practitioner. "There is no problem whatsoever. I have not seen anything that I could consider a health hazard. There's more pollution in Clonmel than in Ballydine. Nobody in Ballydine has anything to fear", he says.
Dr Carey states that there is no health problem within the factory, and this is confirmed by Edwin Fitzgerald of the ITCWU: "The plant is probably one of the most sophisticated plants in this country as regards health matters. We have nothing but the highest praise for them."
Edwin Fitzgerald is not aware of any problems outside Hanrahan's farm. "What Hanrahan seems to lack is solid evidence, and I think it behoves him to get proof,” he says. John Condon of Merck Sharp & Dohme comments:
"There is no other farmer who has come into us and said they are having problems with their cattle."
Dr Oister is a homeopathic doctor who practises in Bolton Street in Clonmel. He comments: "In my 37 years' of practice, I have never seen so many people coming to me with skin problems. Nearly one in every three patients that I see suffers from one sort of skin problem or other. I have practised in England and Scotland and I also have clinics in Roscommon and Kilkenny. On average, one in every forty patients would have skin problems, nothing like the numbers I have come across in the few weeks I have been in Clonmel."
Other doctors in the area, however, claim that there is no unusual human health problem in the area. The only exception was Dr O'Callaghan in Clonmel, who refused to comment. To conclude that there was a problem, one doctor pointed out, they would need to do a survey in the valley and a similar survey in another valley of the same size. Until they did that they were not in a position to say whether there was a human health problem in the area
According to the Department of Health this is being done at the moment. It will be some time before it is finished.
"They set out on the wrong basis. They wanted at all stages to insist that it was happening on one farm only. I think they set out with a fairly closed mind and they wanted to prove themselves right. It could have been handled better and it should have been handled better. I think they've put too much trust in Merck. I'm fairly certain that something is wrong," says an official in Clonmel who refused to be named.
He is talking about his colleagues. Like many other officials both in Dublin and in Clonmel, this man has a file on the problems in Ballydine. He keeps the following quotation at the beginning of the file. It is from Joyce Eggington's book "Bitter Harvest":
"It happened at the same time as Watergate and they called it Cattlegate. But there was no big cover-up. It was not what was done that was wrong, but what was not done by people in authority who did not realise the magnitude of the problem.
"All the relevant institutions of democracy failed to solve the problem. Rather than working together to solve the problem they operated individually and did not share their knowledge. This was not due to malice but simply because this was an event outside their experience and beyond their budgetary means to resolve.
"They underestimated the seriousness of the problem and its implications and when they finally acknowledged it they tried to pass it on as being someone else's responsibility to find the cause.
"A properly co-ordinated approach of all the relevant groups involved with authority to involve some others who may have specialised equipment or knowledge would have been a better approach." .
MERCK SHARP &DOHME
MERCK Sharp & Dohme is the largest pharmaceutical company in the US and the second largest in the world. Unlike many of the other large multi-national drug manufacturing companies, theirs is not a household name mainly because their products are available on prescription only and thus not sold across the counter.
In 1980, with a sales turnover of $2.7 billion, they made pre-tax profits of $656 million. They now employ over 32,000 people in 70 plants (25 of them in the US, and 45 based in a total of 28 countries worldwide), 10 research laboratories and 17 experimental farms. Merck now does nearly half of its business outside the US.
In 1979, in the index of the most popped pills in the world, Merck had no fewer than three entries; at number 3 was Aldomet, a drug used to reduce high blood pressure, which nets the company $300 million worth of business; number 4 was Clinoril (which is the trade name for sulindac) which is prescribed for arthritis; at number 6 was Indocid, also prescribed for arthritis, among other conditions. Indocid and Clinoril are made in the Ballydine plant.
Merck have been in trouble with the US Food and Drugs Administration in connection with both Indocid and Aldomet. Aldomet has been found to have certain undesirable side effects, and Indocid was misleadingly labelled in some Latin American countries-inadequate hazard warnings lead to its prescription for children, some of whom died as a result according to the Food and Drugs Administration.
The effectiveness of Indocid and Aldomet is also disputed. A 1970 report by the US National Academy of Sciences in association with the National Research Council found that no fewer than 14 of Merck's products were "ineffective".
Merck is currently being sued by over 350 women who claim they developed vaginal cancer caused by the drug diethylstilbestrol (DES) prescribed for their mothers during pregnancy. Merck was only one of the several companies involved in the production and marketing of the drug. If the women win their case, the companies involved between them stand to lose over $350 billion in compensation which they would be forced to pay.
In the ten years after the introduction in the early 1960s of the lucrative Aldomet and Indocid drugs, the company hit a ten-year trough with no new drugs developed until the mid-1970s. The decision in 1975 to plough a phenomenal billion dollars a year into research and development paid off, with the discovery of Clinoril, Flexoril (which is produced in the Ballydine plant and used to ease muscle spasms), Mefoxin (a general antibiotic) and Timoptic (a glaucoma treatment). In the past two years Merck have made a lucrative push into the antibiotic market.
In a report entitled " An Examination of Questionable Payments and Practices" by Simon and Kennedy it was revealed that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (a bodyresponsible for ensuring that companies in public ownership disclose all relevant company information to their shareholders) had discovered that between 1968 and 1977 Merck had made questionable payments totalling 3,863,785 dollars, the bulk of which went in foreign political and commercial payments in 39 countries. Following an investigation by the US Internal Revenue Service, during 1972 and 1973 Merck were forced to pay an additional $264,000 in tax.
In common with several other multi-national pharmaceutical concerns,Merck decided some years ago to hedge their bets and invest in other areas. One of their more profitable sidelines has been Hubbard Farm which has a plant in Walshetown Mullingar. Hubbard Farms are the world's leading experimental breeders of chickens and turkeys with specific genetic traits - they are known "superchickens".
Merck Sharp & Dohme has its headquarters in Rahway, New Jersey, It has been publicly owned since 1919, with the Merck descendants now owning only a small fraction of the shares (The Rockefeller family, incidentally own 0.61 % of the shares, which had a estimated market value in 1974 of $30 million.)
Since the death of George Merck (who was appointed during World War 2 to direct the War Research Service, which concerned itself with biological warfare research) in 1957, Merck Sharp & Dohme has been run by professional managers. In 1979, the chairman of Merck Sharp & Dohme, John Horan, said the following; "Our aim now is to clearly establish Merck as the pre-eminent drug maker worldwide in the 1980s."