8 October 1998 Edition
The awful economy of truth
After a new report found aluminum at levels liable to cause death in animals and serious ill-health in humans Robert Allen examines the shocking story of pollution in West Limerick
In large communities it is called rumour but in small communities it is knowing. You cannot hide real events and call them by another name, because men are not fools and if you give them the evidence of their ears and eyes, and even with a minimum of intelligence, they can piece together all the facts.
Walter Macken, Brown Lord of the Mountain, Brandon
North west Limerick, a stone's throw from the Shannon estuary, is to the innocent traveller a place of quiet beauty and solitude. Beef and dairy cattle are abundant on luscious fields. It's a glimpse of a time when the production of food was essential to the well-being of Irish communities, this seemingly rural setting is a false one, for beyond the fields on the western horizon the idyll is shattered by the smokestacks of industry and modern commerce.
The nearest are that of Aughinish Alumina, where the refinement of alumina from bauxite results in the emission of 17,000 tonnes a year of sulphur dioxide and many other chemicals and heavy metals in particulate form. They fall onto fields and farms as acid rain and are taken up by plants and animals.
Further along the estuary lies Tarbert oil-fired power generating station and Moneypoint coal-fired station which combine with other industries to spew thousands of tonnes of pollutants into the Clare and Limerick air.
Sometime during the late 80s this deadly cocktail of pollutants, augmented by pollution streams from the European mainland, began to change the lives of the local farmers, resulting in the deaths of aproximately 330 animals and general ill health among animals on many farms.
``Given the scale of emissions from industries in the Shannon estuary it would be surprising if there were no ill effects or manifestations of pollution in the region,'' botanist Rory Finegan lamented in the conclusion of his investigation into the vegetational and animal health problems on the 59 acre farm of Liam Somers at Issane near the ancient monastary town of Askeaton in west Limerick.
As the animals died in their hundreds, the farmers around the Askeaton and Ballysteen areas of west Limerick felt powerless - particularly Liam Somers and Justin Ryan who between them had lost roughly 200 animals. They were at the mercy of the state's obfuscations and industry's propaganda.
In the midst of their despair and frustration they had become dependent on bureaucrats, scientists, politicians, journalists and environmentalists in the hope that these elites would somehow represent their plight to the wider community. And that someone would do something positive when, inevitably they naively assumed, the cause of the problems were revealed.
This rested on a false belief that a solution acceptable to everyone implicated in this ecological soap opera would be discovered.
Consequently, as the government procrasinated and bureaucrats deliberated, the farmers realised fairly quickly that their interests were secondary to local industry, Limerick council, the ESB (which operates power stations in the 26 counties). That the farmers' animals had been poisoned, their own health (and that of their neighbours) impaired and their livelihoods destroyed appeared to be of concern to all these pocket hierarchies. Yet, they feared, it would come to nothing.
For a while it seemed it might be different. Ireland's primary green groups, the Cork Environmental Alliance, Earthwatch and Greenpeace (now Voice of Irish Concern for the Environment - VOICE) got involved. The Green Party pledged its support to the farmers. The media dutifully reported the `story' from most of the respective angles. Several politicians expressed their concern. Many individuals supported the farmers' genuine claims. A £1million investigation co-ordinated by the Environmental Protection Agency was set up. Industry in the area was required to apply for integrated pollution licences from the EPA.
Yet despite all this activity, no one has tried to bring together all the ecological, agricultural, scientific, social and political threads into a web that would allow them to explain why the problem has occurred. The EPA's investigation has rested solely on science and has not involved the social, political and economic subtexts. Additionally it is only their science that counts. The publication of several independent studies has simply contributed to the scientific confusion in the minds of the public.
Those who in a different era would have been able to explain the other perspectives do not have the resources or the will. The establishment media in Ireland no longer encourages investigative journalism that does not involve tip-offs or leaks. The green movement lacks resources and willpower. Those political parties who should be making an issue of the pollution and animal health problems in west Limerick do not have the expertise.
The EPA's agenda became apparent when its three interim reports were published in September 1995, April 1997 and August 1998. Unfortunately for the farmers the investigation was retrospective. ``It is clear,'' the authors of the second report state, ``that whatever adverse circumstances led to the cattle deaths and ill-health on Ryan's and Somers' farms in the late 1980s and early 1990s are now absent.''
The reason for the state's inability to address these issues holistically is both complex and simple. We live in a world which is dominated by the culture of consumerism. Social ecologist Murray Bookchin has described this to include every aspect of production, consumption, community life and family. ``Our agricultural epoch - a distinctively capitalist one - envisions food cultivation as a business enterprise to be operated strictly for the purpose of generating profit in a market economy.''
Although the farmers around Askeaton practiced industrial agriculture for the benefit of the national economy, they were unwittingly up against a global hierarchy - in the form of the chemical industry. The fact that food - milk in the case of the Limerick farmers - is a commodity in much the same way that aluminium is matters little here.
Aluminium benefits the global economy, milk doesn't. If the milk becomes contaminated, the obvious course of action is to pretend there isn't a real problem, otherwise people would be wary of buying the product. Both the national and the global economies needed to be protected.
Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the cogs of government were maintained and the wheels of commerce rolled on. Industry went about the business of improving its image, not forgetting to stress the importance of their continued existence to the local economies.
Yet the problems of pollution and ill health remained. No one in authority genuinely considered the potential catalyst for the farmers' problems - and when they did they could do it with an arrogant air by dismissing evidence that conflicted with their own. The legislation governing integrated pollution licences would take care of that - when the time came.
Farmers with generational knowledge of their land do not become bad farmers overnight no more than people suddenly become ill without cause. ``Every farmer around here has bad problems,'' one farmer said in 1995, aware that until 1995 there hadn't been a genuine attempt to record exactly what the animal and human health problems were. The animal health problems identified on the farms of the affected farmers were seen by the majority of local farmers as the extreme end of the problem.
The Askeaton, Ballysteen Animal Health Committee, when it was set up by the farmers in May 1994 to investigate ``the situation as far as possible'' didn't have the funds to commission the kind of independent analysis which, augmented by the rich local knowledge of the people who live in west Limerick, would have conclusively revealed the extent of the pollution. The independent studies that have been done are specific to individual farms and circumstances.
Significantly none of the regulatory authorities have been able to characterise all the local pollution either, particularly atmospheric pollution, and as the wind patterns are variable this pollution has been widespread. A westerly carries most of the pollution over the farms of Somers and Ryan but their problems appeared to be unique. The reason for that would surely baffle any authority that did not wish to learn the truth.
And there is no evidence from the investiation that the state has ever wanted to provide answers to the farmers, other than to prove that everything is OK now. Dr. Paul Toner of the EPA was adamant in 1995 that until proven otherwise the existing pollution in the area is within safe levels, though he admitted that the overall problem could be quite complex.
Several scientists, notably Finegan, called in 1995 for more detailed information on the industrial processes to the west of the affected areas - Aughinish and the two power stations. Conversely Finegan was adamant that ``sick plants and sick animals'' are a sufficient enough indication that ``environmental pollution is occurring''. There is, he said in 1995, ``a superimposition of pollutants'' in the area. Yet Aughinish were able, in all innocence it seemed, to state they are not and never have been the source of the farmers' problems - their spin doctor Frank Dunlop saying at the hearing into his company's integrated pollution licence (during the summer of 1997) that accusations against his company were unfounded.
But, as Finegan said, there is no comprehensive information on the effects on people, animals, wild and plant life from the pollution in west Limerick, irrespective of the sources. Aughinish know it is not legally possible to claim that any one pollutant is responsible for any one illness, whether in animals or humans, and that is their defence. Instead of the onus being on Aughinish to prove that they aren't responsible, whether as the primary source or as part of an aggregate of sources, the farmers must prove that they are and for the moment the law and science are not geared towards that eventuality.
The coalition government of Fine Gael/Labour/DL had urged the senior civil servants in the departments of Health, Environment and Agriculture to take seriously the farmers' problems. Yet before the investigation began in earnest the government agencies involved were telling the media there wasn't a problem. Their tune hasn't changed.
The Mid-Western Health Board made it clear that it believed there were no human health problems associated with industrial pollution in west Limerick, contradicting the local knowledge that a high number of people sufferied from a range of illnesses. The Health Board's epidemiological study and long term monitoring programme of human health in the Shannon estuary area has unsurprisingly revealed nothing so far - but critics of the study have pointed out that their methodology is flawed, inadequate and therefore unlikely to find anything.
The EPA, which is co-ordinating the investigation in conjuction with Teagasc (the agricultural advisory board), the Mid-Western Health Board and the Veterinary Research Laboratory, has been publishing weighty tomes which look impressive but reveal nothing of substance. The investigation was set up to include a study of animal health on the affected farms (using a control group of animals from an unpolluted farm), an analysis of the animals' immune systems and a general study of all animal health in the area; sampling of soil, herbage, vegetation, animal feed, drinking water and milk; and atmospheric emissions. The samples were tested for minerals, heavy metals, organic and inorganic chemicals. ``If it is industrial pollution we will attempt to prevent that pollution,'' said Dr.Toner of the EPA in 1995. ``We are the regulatory authority and we will take action.''
This week, as the mystery once again concentrated the minds of the regulatory authority following the publication of the Irish Equine Centre's independent study which found aluminum at levels liable to cause death in animals and serious ill-health in humans, the farmers now believe no action will ever be taken.
The EPA, raged Simon White - one of the affected farmers and a member of the Irish Farmers Association's Industrial and Environment Committee - is ``more concerned with protecting industrial operations than they are in protecting the environment''. White's frustration at the EPA's insistence that there is ``no evidence of aluminum toxicity'' in the area is an accurate reflection of the mood among the affected farmers and the local community.
Now it appears that this latest ecological soap-opera may be played out in the courts. The Cork Environmental Alliance's warning, after the Hanrahan family's successful prosecution of Merck Sharp and Dohme for alleged chemical pollution in the 70s and 80s, that this kind of toxic tragedy should never be allowed to happen again has been ignored. ``From the very beginning this investigation was seen by many as little more than a `cover-up' designed simply as a damage limitation exercise to protect state industrial policy in the Shannon Estuary,'' the CEA's Derry Chambers said last week. ``There can be no other logical reason for the incompetence displayed in the investigation procedure.''
This is an edited version of a chapter on the Askeaton story intended for publication next year. If anyone wants a copy of the full draft please contact the author at An Phoblacht.
In large communities it is called rumour but in small communities it is knowing. You cannot hide real events and call them by another name, because men are not fools and if you give them the evidence of their ears and eyes, and even with a minimum of intelligence, they can piece together all the facts.
Walter Macken, Brown Lord of the Mountain, Brandon
North west Limerick, a stone's throw from the Shannon estuary, is to the innocent traveller a place of quiet beauty and solitude. Beef and dairy cattle are abundant on luscious fields. It's a glimpse of a time when the production of food was essential to the well-being of Irish communities, this seemingly rural setting is a false one, for beyond the fields on the western horizon the idyll is shattered by the smokestacks of industry and modern commerce.
The nearest are that of Aughinish Alumina, where the refinement of alumina from bauxite results in the emission of 17,000 tonnes a year of sulphur dioxide and many other chemicals and heavy metals in particulate form. They fall onto fields and farms as acid rain and are taken up by plants and animals.
Further along the estuary lies Tarbert oil-fired power generating station and Moneypoint coal-fired station which combine with other industries to spew thousands of tonnes of pollutants into the Clare and Limerick air.
Sometime during the late 80s this deadly cocktail of pollutants, augmented by pollution streams from the European mainland, began to change the lives of the local farmers, resulting in the deaths of aproximately 330 animals and general ill health among animals on many farms.
``Given the scale of emissions from industries in the Shannon estuary it would be surprising if there were no ill effects or manifestations of pollution in the region,'' botanist Rory Finegan lamented in the conclusion of his investigation into the vegetational and animal health problems on the 59 acre farm of Liam Somers at Issane near the ancient monastary town of Askeaton in west Limerick.
As the animals died in their hundreds, the farmers around the Askeaton and Ballysteen areas of west Limerick felt powerless - particularly Liam Somers and Justin Ryan who between them had lost roughly 200 animals. They were at the mercy of the state's obfuscations and industry's propaganda.
In the midst of their despair and frustration they had become dependent on bureaucrats, scientists, politicians, journalists and environmentalists in the hope that these elites would somehow represent their plight to the wider community. And that someone would do something positive when, inevitably they naively assumed, the cause of the problems were revealed.
This rested on a false belief that a solution acceptable to everyone implicated in this ecological soap opera would be discovered.
Consequently, as the government procrasinated and bureaucrats deliberated, the farmers realised fairly quickly that their interests were secondary to local industry, Limerick council, the ESB (which operates power stations in the 26 counties). That the farmers' animals had been poisoned, their own health (and that of their neighbours) impaired and their livelihoods destroyed appeared to be of concern to all these pocket hierarchies. Yet, they feared, it would come to nothing.
For a while it seemed it might be different. Ireland's primary green groups, the Cork Environmental Alliance, Earthwatch and Greenpeace (now Voice of Irish Concern for the Environment - VOICE) got involved. The Green Party pledged its support to the farmers. The media dutifully reported the `story' from most of the respective angles. Several politicians expressed their concern. Many individuals supported the farmers' genuine claims. A £1million investigation co-ordinated by the Environmental Protection Agency was set up. Industry in the area was required to apply for integrated pollution licences from the EPA.
Yet despite all this activity, no one has tried to bring together all the ecological, agricultural, scientific, social and political threads into a web that would allow them to explain why the problem has occurred. The EPA's investigation has rested solely on science and has not involved the social, political and economic subtexts. Additionally it is only their science that counts. The publication of several independent studies has simply contributed to the scientific confusion in the minds of the public.
Those who in a different era would have been able to explain the other perspectives do not have the resources or the will. The establishment media in Ireland no longer encourages investigative journalism that does not involve tip-offs or leaks. The green movement lacks resources and willpower. Those political parties who should be making an issue of the pollution and animal health problems in west Limerick do not have the expertise.
The EPA's agenda became apparent when its three interim reports were published in September 1995, April 1997 and August 1998. Unfortunately for the farmers the investigation was retrospective. ``It is clear,'' the authors of the second report state, ``that whatever adverse circumstances led to the cattle deaths and ill-health on Ryan's and Somers' farms in the late 1980s and early 1990s are now absent.''
The reason for the state's inability to address these issues holistically is both complex and simple. We live in a world which is dominated by the culture of consumerism. Social ecologist Murray Bookchin has described this to include every aspect of production, consumption, community life and family. ``Our agricultural epoch - a distinctively capitalist one - envisions food cultivation as a business enterprise to be operated strictly for the purpose of generating profit in a market economy.''
Although the farmers around Askeaton practiced industrial agriculture for the benefit of the national economy, they were unwittingly up against a global hierarchy - in the form of the chemical industry. The fact that food - milk in the case of the Limerick farmers - is a commodity in much the same way that aluminium is matters little here.
Aluminium benefits the global economy, milk doesn't. If the milk becomes contaminated, the obvious course of action is to pretend there isn't a real problem, otherwise people would be wary of buying the product. Both the national and the global economies needed to be protected.
Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the cogs of government were maintained and the wheels of commerce rolled on. Industry went about the business of improving its image, not forgetting to stress the importance of their continued existence to the local economies.
Yet the problems of pollution and ill health remained. No one in authority genuinely considered the potential catalyst for the farmers' problems - and when they did they could do it with an arrogant air by dismissing evidence that conflicted with their own. The legislation governing integrated pollution licences would take care of that - when the time came.
Farmers with generational knowledge of their land do not become bad farmers overnight no more than people suddenly become ill without cause. ``Every farmer around here has bad problems,'' one farmer said in 1995, aware that until 1995 there hadn't been a genuine attempt to record exactly what the animal and human health problems were. The animal health problems identified on the farms of the affected farmers were seen by the majority of local farmers as the extreme end of the problem.
The Askeaton, Ballysteen Animal Health Committee, when it was set up by the farmers in May 1994 to investigate ``the situation as far as possible'' didn't have the funds to commission the kind of independent analysis which, augmented by the rich local knowledge of the people who live in west Limerick, would have conclusively revealed the extent of the pollution. The independent studies that have been done are specific to individual farms and circumstances.
Significantly none of the regulatory authorities have been able to characterise all the local pollution either, particularly atmospheric pollution, and as the wind patterns are variable this pollution has been widespread. A westerly carries most of the pollution over the farms of Somers and Ryan but their problems appeared to be unique. The reason for that would surely baffle any authority that did not wish to learn the truth.
And there is no evidence from the investiation that the state has ever wanted to provide answers to the farmers, other than to prove that everything is OK now. Dr. Paul Toner of the EPA was adamant in 1995 that until proven otherwise the existing pollution in the area is within safe levels, though he admitted that the overall problem could be quite complex.
Several scientists, notably Finegan, called in 1995 for more detailed information on the industrial processes to the west of the affected areas - Aughinish and the two power stations. Conversely Finegan was adamant that ``sick plants and sick animals'' are a sufficient enough indication that ``environmental pollution is occurring''. There is, he said in 1995, ``a superimposition of pollutants'' in the area. Yet Aughinish were able, in all innocence it seemed, to state they are not and never have been the source of the farmers' problems - their spin doctor Frank Dunlop saying at the hearing into his company's integrated pollution licence (during the summer of 1997) that accusations against his company were unfounded.
But, as Finegan said, there is no comprehensive information on the effects on people, animals, wild and plant life from the pollution in west Limerick, irrespective of the sources. Aughinish know it is not legally possible to claim that any one pollutant is responsible for any one illness, whether in animals or humans, and that is their defence. Instead of the onus being on Aughinish to prove that they aren't responsible, whether as the primary source or as part of an aggregate of sources, the farmers must prove that they are and for the moment the law and science are not geared towards that eventuality.
The coalition government of Fine Gael/Labour/DL had urged the senior civil servants in the departments of Health, Environment and Agriculture to take seriously the farmers' problems. Yet before the investigation began in earnest the government agencies involved were telling the media there wasn't a problem. Their tune hasn't changed.
The Mid-Western Health Board made it clear that it believed there were no human health problems associated with industrial pollution in west Limerick, contradicting the local knowledge that a high number of people sufferied from a range of illnesses. The Health Board's epidemiological study and long term monitoring programme of human health in the Shannon estuary area has unsurprisingly revealed nothing so far - but critics of the study have pointed out that their methodology is flawed, inadequate and therefore unlikely to find anything.
The EPA, which is co-ordinating the investigation in conjuction with Teagasc (the agricultural advisory board), the Mid-Western Health Board and the Veterinary Research Laboratory, has been publishing weighty tomes which look impressive but reveal nothing of substance. The investigation was set up to include a study of animal health on the affected farms (using a control group of animals from an unpolluted farm), an analysis of the animals' immune systems and a general study of all animal health in the area; sampling of soil, herbage, vegetation, animal feed, drinking water and milk; and atmospheric emissions. The samples were tested for minerals, heavy metals, organic and inorganic chemicals. ``If it is industrial pollution we will attempt to prevent that pollution,'' said Dr.Toner of the EPA in 1995. ``We are the regulatory authority and we will take action.''
This week, as the mystery once again concentrated the minds of the regulatory authority following the publication of the Irish Equine Centre's independent study which found aluminum at levels liable to cause death in animals and serious ill-health in humans, the farmers now believe no action will ever be taken.
The EPA, raged Simon White - one of the affected farmers and a member of the Irish Farmers Association's Industrial and Environment Committee - is ``more concerned with protecting industrial operations than they are in protecting the environment''. White's frustration at the EPA's insistence that there is ``no evidence of aluminum toxicity'' in the area is an accurate reflection of the mood among the affected farmers and the local community.
Now it appears that this latest ecological soap-opera may be played out in the courts. The Cork Environmental Alliance's warning, after the Hanrahan family's successful prosecution of Merck Sharp and Dohme for alleged chemical pollution in the 70s and 80s, that this kind of toxic tragedy should never be allowed to happen again has been ignored. ``From the very beginning this investigation was seen by many as little more than a `cover-up' designed simply as a damage limitation exercise to protect state industrial policy in the Shannon Estuary,'' the CEA's Derry Chambers said last week. ``There can be no other logical reason for the incompetence displayed in the investigation procedure.''
This is an edited version of a chapter on the Askeaton story intended for publication next year. If anyone wants a copy of the full draft please contact the author at An Phoblacht.