What we could do with €540 billion in oil and gas

national | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Monday February 21, 2011 22:46 by AC

What could we do with the €540 billion in oil and gas which according to the Irish government lies in Ireland’s Atlantic Margin area?

It’s a mind-bogglingly large amount of money.

Actually, let’s assume for a moment only one-third of it is commercially viable. And let’s assume we decide to share a generous 50% of it with industry. That leaves €90 billion.

Let’s not think of the €50 billion PROVEN find in the Dalkey field in the Irish Sea. And the inland Lough Allen gas field, which may have a value of €94 billion. Let’s forget completely about them. Let’s forget, too, about the rest of our offshore territory – the Atlantic Margin area (that the government says has the €540 billion) occupies less than one-third of Ireland’s offshore.

Let’s just think about a nice round, extremely conservative, figure of €100 billion.

So. What could we buy with €100 billion? Well...

• The cost of building 25 new 50-teacher schools and running them for 50 years = €5 billion
• The cost of giving medical cards to everyone for 20 years, based on €500million cost in 2009 to cover 1.5million people = €20 billion
• Reduce the pupil-teacher ratio in primary schools to 1:20 for the next 20 years = €15 billion
• Get rid of the need for the planned public spending cuts over the next three years = €15 billion

Damn, That only makes €55 billion. We need to do some more wacky stuff:
• Build two Large Hadron Colliders (the underground particle accelerators on the Swiss/ French border) = €10 billion
• Start Ireland’s own space programme, by building 3 1.2 billion space shuttles - = €5 billion
• Pay the grocery bills of everybody in the country for a year = €10 billion
• Fund the UN’s entire World Food Programme for 2 years = €10 billion

Ahh, finally managed to spend it. But instead of all that sensible-ish stuff, why not go completely crazy?
• Give it to a bunch of fabulously wealthy gamblers who made some losses on the market
• Buy a few broken banks

Nope, still not mad enough. Let's go for the most lunatic proposal of all:
• Give it to a bunch of oil and gas corporations who will use it to buy your democracy out from under you, whose cops and courts will then beat and jail you if you dare to try make an effective protest.

Ah no, nobody is that crazy…

Without apologies to the Sunday Business Post.