This may not be the end of the long-running Corrib gas saga, writes Lorna Siggins, Marine Correspondent.
The €800 million Corrib gas terminal development has already been the subject of two Bord Pleanála oral hearings, and may very well be referred to a third if and when yesterday's decision is appealed.
Objectors have four weeks within which to lodge an appeal to An Bord Pleanála. The protracted saga dates back to October 1996 when Enterprise Oil, now owned by Royal Dutch Shell, confirmed that the field had been discovered 70 kilometres off the Mayo coast in over 349 metres of water.
Four years later, in November 2000, Enterprise and its partners made their first application for planning permission for an onshore terminal or refinery for the gas at Bellanaboy, north Mayo, on land formerly owned by Coillte. When Mayo County Council sought further information after local concerns were raised, the company submitted a new planning application in April 2001.
However, there was another request by the planning authority for more information before it was given approval in August 2001, with a series of conditions.
Several weeks later, the then minister for the marine, Mr Frank Fahey, who was responsible for regulating the offshore and foreshore aspects of the project, told the Humbert Summer School in Ballina, Co Mayo, that objectors were holding up progress in the west.
In November 2001, the marine minister issued the project with a petroleum lease - the first new production lease in the last 30 years. His Department also received applications for the company for a foreshore licence, and approval to construct an onshore pipeline, with an environmental impact statement.
This foreshore licence was granted by the Minister for the Marine in May, 2002, after he had commissioned and published a study on the application by a marine licence vetting committee. At this stage local fishermen had already expressed concern about the impact of the onshore pipeline and had engaged the services of an expert from Southampton University.
The first of two Bord Pleanála hearings on the onshore terminal opened in February 2002, and in June 2002 the board asked the company for further information and raised concerns about health and safety aspects of the project.
This additional information was furnished in September 2002, but it wasn't enough for the appeals board. It decided to hold an unprecedented second hearing in November/December 2002 - which resulted in a ruling last April that the project should not be approved.
An Bord Pleanála only accepted one of its inspector's three reasons for rejecting the application to build the terminal.
The inspector, Mr Kevin Moore, had cited visual obtrusiveness and adverse environmental impact, instability of the blanket bog to which excavated peat from the site was to be transferred, and the risk to human health under the Seveso II directive, given the proximity of the site to houses.
Mr Moore also pointed out that projects similar to the Corrib proposal in other parts of the world were tied back to offshore platforms, and not to land-based terminals. Where terminals were built on land, they were in coastal, rather than inland, locations, he said.
The inspector said that the developer, Shell, had not proved that an alternative option was not viable. He also found that the terminal would be contrary to the strategic planning of infrastructural development for the Border, Midlands and Western (BMW) region and would contravene the Mayo County Development Plan.
However, the appeals board only accepted Mr Moore's second reason - the instability of peat transferred from the terminal site, and overlaid at two metres deep across 94 metres of neighbouring blanket bog, which was on a slope above the R314 regional road.
In its latest application, Shell plans to transfer 450,000 cubic metres of peat and 50,000 cubic metres of mineral soil to an alternative location 11 kilometres away, at Srahmore. However, a series of landslides at Dooncarton Hill in north Mayo last September prompted a Galway-based engineer, Mr Brian Coyle, to highlight the risks attached to this plan.
In a submission to Mayo County Council, he described the proposal as even more risky than the last, and predicted that such a movement of wet peat could discharge at least 400 million litres of acidic base water into the north and south of Carrowmore Lake - the only drinking water supply for the entire region.