Shell's sweetheart deal with State

Near the village of Rossport, in the far-flung corner of Ireland that is North Mayo, people who have never been involved in protests in their lives have mounted a 24-hour vigil outside the largest construction site in the region. Five local men are in prison for obstructing the work in the area and a couple of weeks ago one man described what was going on there as an area in open revolt against the Government and Shell.

The Rossport Five, in prison now for a month, have brought national attention to a protest which has been rumbling on for years beneath the surface. It is a protest over a local issue, but it should also get us to look more closely at the deal Shell struck with the then Government, which gives them the gas fields off the Mayo coast for nothing.

The people of Rossport have very legitimate concerns, as even Minister Noel Dempsey, the man who will most likely sign off on the permission for Shell to go ahead with their plans, admits. Their concern is about the pressure of the gas in the pipeline which will bring the offshore gas ashore near the village. The pipeline will then run overland for about nine kilometres to a refinery currently being built – and picketed.

The pressure in the pipeline will be greater than that in similar facilities anywhere in the world. Families have lived for generations within close range of the pipeline route and, to be blunt, they are concerned about the prospect of an explosion that would take them to kingdom come. They want the gas to be refined on an offshore platform and piped ashore under normal pressure: they don't care how close to their homes that particular pipeline is.

But adopting the high-pressure pipeline gives huge advantages to Shell. By building a refinery on land, should they discover any more gas fields in the future, they won't have to go to the expense of designing or adopting an offshore platform: they will just lay a new pipeline to the existing refinery.

The current project is costing €900 million to build, but the potential profit to the company is multiples of that. Should another gas pocket be found, the whole revenue from that find will be almost total profit. The earnings are potentially so vast that you imagine the decision by Shell to sell off all of its petrol stations in the country a couple of weeks ago hardly cost them a thought. The logic must be to take all the bad publicity going in Ireland; it can't affect a multinational conglomerate which has no retail outlets here.

The protests are having a huge effect on North Mayo, a place where people say they even feel cut off from the rest of the county, never mind the rest of Ireland. One of the imprisoned men had only been out of the area once before, to visit Dublin for two weeks. He hated it, his mother kept phoning him and he couldn't wait to get back to his own place. It is a Gaeltacht, but people say they feel abandoned by the Department of the Gaeltacht, by their Minister, and indeed by one of their own TDs, the leader of the opposition, Enda Kenny.

But people there will also tell you that the protest has galvanised the community in a way no other issue has. People come together daily to attend the picket lines; there is lobbying and poster-making to be done.

This is a hugely serious issue for local people, but it raises another issue. How did a previous government hand over a huge natural resource to a company for nothing? In return, they will pay just 25 per cent corporation tax on the profits. We will be told that it was because of the huge costs involved in offshore exploration and the frequent negative returns on earlier drilling.

But what part did the lobbying by Shell play? Who made the crucial decisions and when? In recent years, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) had proven itself to be a hugely-effective vehicle for monitoring waste and bad decisions by successive departments. The fact that little was changed in many of those departments afterwards is nothing to do with the PAC, but the Shell sweetheart deal is surely something to be looked at more closely.

Of course the PAC is headed by an opposition TD, at the moment Michael Noonon of Fine Gael. His party leader, Enda Kenny, is one of the local TDs in Mayo, and people in Rossport will tell you that he has spent the last month engaged in a prolonged spell of fence sitting.

Fergal Keane is a reporter with RTÉ Radio's Five Seven Live