Angry Offaly councillors condemn 'unjust transition' plan

SIMMERING disquiet over the so-called Just Transition for Offaly boiled over on Monday.

At a meeting of the County Council, one councillor said a warning from 31 years ago had not been heeded, another stated the “unjust transition” would be the proper label for the process, while a third declared that his doubt about earlier promises had been proved correct.

Cllr Danny Owens recalled a newspaper report from 1989 on the job cuts in Bord na Mona then, when a workforce of 6,200 shrank to 4,700.

Cllr Owens said that Eddie Joe Dooley, councillor at the time and father of current representative Eamon, said it would be difficult for replacement jobs to be found.

“Today we face an even bleaker future than we did 31 years ago,” the Fianna Fail councillor said.

Of the total 2,200 employed by Bord na Mona in 2018, approximately half were in Offaly and the vast majority are general operatives who will find it very difficult to gain employment.

Cllr Owens recalled the appearance of Bord na Mona chief executive Tom Donnellan before the local authority when he pledged the creation of 700 new jobs.

“So far all we can see are job losses.”

He praised Deputy Barry Cowen and Cllr Eamon Dooley for going to Brussels and successfully lobbying for Ireland's inclusion in the EU Coal Regions in Transition Platform, a fund worth €171m.

However, he warned that the funding from Irish sources would not be enough. The €11m fund announced last year, €5m of which will come from the ESB, must now be shared with Meath as well, resulting in it being spread across nine counties.

It has been decided that each county must get 5% of that fund regardless of the number of people made redundant.

The Killoughey councillor feared that Offaly will not get its fair share from the EU fund if the Irish model for distribution is replicated.

“If the funding is not linked to job losses Offaly is once again set to be the loser.”

He said the 1989 warning must be heeded and Offaly must be recognised as the single most impacted county with “all financial packages reflecting that indisputable fact”.

County Councils, including Offaly, should administer the €171m, he added, saying the money should follow the job losses.

“We in Fianna Fail are very serious about this and very upset about how it has evolved and will be doing everything in our power to ensure that Offaly County Council get to administer the funding in future.”

Cllr John Leahy, Independent, angrily denounced the application procedure for the €11m pot and said: “I'm calling Just Transition an 'unjust transition' as ESB walk away from the Midlands' communities again.”

The deadline for the first tranche of funding applications passed last Friday and about 150 groups entered the competition for the rescue package.

Cllr Leahy said the application process was so complex – requiring 20,400 words in a 32-page document – that it appeared to be designed to “make sure that nobody gets any money out of this”.

Financial information was required and it got to the point where it was costing community groups money to submit the application.

One group said it was the “toughest application form they ever filled out” and it contained contradictions which he did not have time to list.

The Kilcormac councillor said the council would have to write to the Just Transition Commissioner, Kieran Mulvey, because he could not believe he would have signed off on the process.

Cllr Leahy also repeated his view that the €20m committed by the previous Government for a retrofitting programme for social housing was merely the State providing money it would have to provide anyway, even without the Just Transition.

He held a similar view on the €5m to be channelled by the Government towards Bord na Mona's bog rewetting plan.

Cllr Leahy trained his heaviest fire on the ESB, saying that after years of “profiteering on the backs of our communities”, it was going to walk away and leave a grant of just €5m.

He calculated that from the PSO levy (a levy on each consumer's electricity bill because power was being generated from peat in Shannonbridge and Lanesboro) the ESB earned €80m a year and had taken in €1.2bn in total.

Cllr Leahy said €5m was about 0.4% of that amount. “That's not even half a per cent of what they got on the PSO levy, never mind the profits they are making,” he said.

“It is an insult to the people of Offaly”.

He proposed that Offaly should ask the ESB for €80m and its chief executive Pat Doherty should be called in to meet the councillors.

Cllr Leahy said Offaly County Council, which was already “€2.5m in debt”, was facing the loss of €4.8m in rates because of ESB and Bord na Mona closures and he believed Minister of State Pippa Hackett, the Offaly Green Party Senator, should also meet the council and exert pressure on Climate Action Minister Eamon Ryan.

“I call on Minister Hackett to meet us because Minister Ryan has the chance to change this from the unjust transition that I'm calling it, to the Just Transition”.

The third representative to join the debate at Monday's meeting of the local authority, Cllr Dooley, said he had been accused of being negative when he was dismissive of what he called Bord na Mona's “herbs and fishes” plan.

The Fianna Fail councillor said the “400 jobs for retrofitting” were pulled out of the air and a proposal to repurpose the PSO to deliver €20m promised by the former Minister, Richard Bruton, was “no longer on the table” for legal reasons.

Cllr Dooley also pointed out that the EPA had “discovered” the water temperature in the Shannon was too high at the ESB plant in Lanesboro “after 40 years”, just before An Bord Pleanala turned down the application to convert the peat plants to biomass.

“We've been taken for fools in this chamber,” said Cllr Dooley, appealing to all 19 councillors to work together to maximise funding for Offaly because the Department of Climate Action always “had it in their head to close down this industry”.

He echoed Cllr Owens' belief that the EU funding will have to be linked to job losses and as Offaly stands to be hit hardest, it should get the most funding.

Cllr Dooley had attended an EU meeting online and was told by a top official that Europe believed the monies should go where the job losses are, and that the grants should be administered by local authorities.

In addition to meeting Minister Hackett, the council needed to lobby Ireland's MEPs, he said.

Cllr Declan Harvey, Fianna Fail, said he always believed the retrofitting and retraining plan was “a load of cover-up”, while Cllr Noel Cribbin, Fine Gael, said he was very disappointed with the work of the Just Transition team and revealed that he helped one group apply for funding and it was “torture”.

Anna Marie Delaney, council chief executive, said the local authority and Mr Mulvey agreed that they should administer the fund but they were not allowed to do so.

“Unfortunately the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform advised that legislation would be required at national level to allow us to undertake that process,” said Ms Delaney.

The Department of Climate Action is administering it and will also be forming the teams which will evaluate the applications.

“We hope that some of the applications that went in are successful,” she said, but added that with 5% of the total going to each of the counties “it does mean that it is spread thinly around the region”.

Cllr John Clendennen, Fine Gael, said getting access to land, whether it be for a coffee shop or an airport, will be key to the success of the process, and he did not know who a developer with an idea should approach.

Ms Delaney told him that Bord na Mona and the ESB were independent entities who control their own land.

The council agreed to write to ESB chief executive Mr Doherty about their concerns on its portion of the funding.