It is highly instructive to contrast the High Court's treatment of the five residents of Erris, north Mayo, imprisoned at the behest of Shell with how the same court dealt with the multinational Turkish based construction company GAMA.

Micheal i Seighin, Willie Corduff, Brendan Philbin, Philip McGrath and Vincent McGrath were dragged before the High Court because they were not content to allow this major multinational company put a highly pressurised pipeline for untreated gas close to their homes with the consequent risk of explosion to themselves, their families and their communities. I was in the High Court on the day that these men were imprisoned. The President of the High Court was not only threatening to jail these men but "every landowner in Mayo" should they not obey his orders. The Rossport Five, as they have come to be known, were then bundled off to Cloverhill prison when they were not prepared to say that they would give up their protest. In fact, it was quite reminiscent of how Socialist Party Councillor Clare Daly and I together with 20 other anti bin tax protestors were treated by the High Court in the course of the autumn of 2003.

When the Labour Inspectors at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment proposed to publish a report of their investigation into worker exploitation on GAMA construction sites, GAMA secured a High Court injunction preventing this publication until a court hearing was held into whether the Department had the power to publish such a report. This injunction was given at a critical time in the struggle of GAMA workers against the slave regime that they had endured of 84 hour working weeks and pay rates of €2.20 per hour. The publication of the report at that time would have assisted that struggle and assisted the workers in achieving justice. However, the High Court only facilitated GAMA.

When it came to the High Court hearing of the case, the judge in question decided that neither the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment nor the Department had the power to commission such a report for publication and therefore she quashed the report. This means that the report could never legally come into the public domain. If the GAMA workers had depended on the institutions of the establishment such as the High Court to secure justice, they would still be in the grip of a ruthless slave machine. Despite the fact that the judges had the report into the blatant and flagrant abuse of labour law by GAMA, they choose to make no comment on this but gave the entire balance of convenience to the exploiter.

In the case of the struggle by the north Mayo community against Shell, the lesson is really the same. It is people power both in Co. Mayo and around the country that can force the government to intervene in this situation. The government has to be pinned with full responsibility for the situation which has emerged, including the jailing of the residents. If there is a sufficiently widespread protest movement, then the government will be forced to intervene.

The entire natural gas wealth off the coast of Ireland is being handed entirely to multinational corporations. The controversy that is now developing because of the brave stand taken by the north Mayo community should be used as an opportunity to stop the process of the robbery of our natural resources. The obvious way to use the natural resources would be to set up a state exploration and production company for natural gas, to assemble the necessary expertise to make an independent assessment of what resources are available, and then to harness those resources in the interests of the majority of the Irish people, while ensuring that the environment is protected.

The history leading up to the imprisonment of five Co. Mayo residents at the behest of oil multinational Shell is one of successive governments bending over backwards to facilitate the pillage of this country's oil and gas wealth by big business.

In 1975, a tax rate of 50% was fixed for successful oil and gas projects. The state was also to have an automatic 50% stake in any commercial wells, in addition to royalties of 6%. All this changed in 1987, when the corrupt Fianna Fail Minister for Energy Ray Burke struck a deal behind closed doors with oil company executives. Against the advice of officials in his own Department, Burke scrapped the state's right to a 50% stake in any commercial oil and gas operations as well as abolishing royalties.

As if this deal wasn't sweet enough for the oil companies, in 1992 Bertie Ahern as Minister for Finance cut the corporation tax rate on oil and gas profits to 25%, one of the lowest in the world (Norway in contrast has a 78% tax on oil and gas profits). The oil companies were also allowed to write off all costs against tax, not merely from their Irish operations but from operations anywhere in the world, going back 25 years.

Furthermore, the government introduced frontier licences, which allowed oil companies to sit on potential drilling locations for up to 20 years in anticipation of rising prices. Shell leads the consortium including Statoil and Marathon Oil which proposes to build the high pressure pipeline, running 9 km from the Co. Mayo shore, in places through unstable bog land, to a recovery terminal on land.

Profit maximisation is of course the reason why Shell wants to build such a pipeline, unprecedented anywhere else in the world, rather than the more costly alternative of an offshore processing facility. Shell plans to exploit the gas reserve off the Mayo coast as cheaply as possible and then sell it back to the Irish people for as high a price as if it were coming from Russia or anywhere else in the world.

Thanks to its friends in government, the consortium doesn't have to pay any royalties and will be able to offset all of its projected €800 million investment against its tax liability. Not a cent from the enormous gas wealth (estimated to be in the region of €12 billion to €21 billion) that lies off our coast will accrue to the Irish people.

Years of intensive lobbying by the oil companies, which always had an open door at the highest levels of government, paid off handsomely for them. Marathon Oil has donated large amounts of money to Fianna F‡il and Enterprise Oil (subsequently taken over by Shell) was no stranger to the annual Fianna F‡il hospitality tent at the Galway races.

In order to facilitate the consortium, Fianna Fail Minister for the Marine, Frank Fahey, imposed compulsory acquisition of land for the pipeline. Fahey also arranged the sale of the 500-acre site owned by the state company Coillte for an undisclosed sum to Shell on which to build its recovery facility. When asked by Socialist Party T.D. Joe Higgins in the Dail in 2001 what value should be placed on the gas in the Corrib field, Fahey admitted he had no idea how much this resource was worth! Not only did the government give away an important natural resource, it did not even bother to have the value of this resource independently assessed.

Following in Fahey's footsteps as unofficial PR man for the oil companies, the current Minister for the Marine and Natural Resources Noel Dempsey initially commissioned a health and safety report on the proposed pipeline- from a company part owned by Shell! If Shell believes it can ride roughshod over the rights of residents living in close proximity to its proposed pipeline, it is because it believes that the government in keeping with its policy of privatising assets properly belonging to the Irish people will back it to the hilt as always.