David and Goliath stories speak straight to the Irish psyche. The enemy looms, you haven't a chance when suddenly something guides your slingshot and pop!, you hit the baddie right where it hurts. The metaphor has long underlined various quirks in the tale of Ireland v Sellafield, formerly Windscale. There it is against a distant horizon: here we are poised as sitting targets if anything nuclear goes wrong.
Something has gone wrong. As a result of special investigations by Britain's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, British Nuclear Fuels is now exposed on a number of fronts, from falsifying data about nuclear waste-reprocessing to releasing nitric acid into its workforce.
This is what we know. The NII has not admitted the accuracy of other reports, such as the alarming rate of increase in childhood and other cancers in the local Lake District community, or that among certain communities in Louth, which is the subject of a separate legal challenge.
Yet the actions of the Irish Government remain as toothless as they have been for over 20 years. While Iceland makes diplomatic protests in person to the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, Germany's Preussen-Elektra threatens to sue the British government, and Japan considers a complete review of its nuclear trade with the UK, Ireland does what it has always done - writes a letter of complaint.
The belief that the pen is mightier than the sword must be commended. But not here. Junior Minister Joe Jacob's prose, however forceful, can't match the powerful vested interests that support BNFL at the Sellafield facility. Now that Goliath is vulnerable, the time is ripe for tactical change.
No one who has visited Sellafield will be surprised to learn that some of its staff have falsified the results of their work. The entire facility is built on falsification, from its claims to manage itself correctly to its consistent denial that increasing shoals of mutated fish in the nearby Irish sea were created by the nature of its business.
You reach Sellafield by travelling through some of Europe's most beautiful landscapes. This is the Lake District William Wordsworth - and Jimmy McGovern - wrote about, the same place Beatrix Potter fought to preserve.
Such natural beauty allows BNFL to suggest its first lie. How could danger lurk in such a breath-taking place? As the roads rise up to meet you on its outskirts - and they do, because the hills undulate down to the Irish Sea - the towers of Sellafield's multifunctional units start to grow like mutant poppies. Immediately, you sense the enormous facility is probably worth as much as, if not more than, Ireland's total GNP.
The fun starts when you check in for the guided tour. A guide resembling a tanned and healthy Sean Connery tells you he is a retired worker who is 10 years older than he looks. The tour bus rumbles past hosts of daffodils, just in case you missed the Wordsworth connection, and refuges of the natterjack toad, an unusually ugly frog that BNFL claims to be rescuing from extinction. Small country graveyards nearby hold the crumbling evidence of young bodies dead before they ought to have been, and of workers who believed their employers's claims to operate best practice in health and safety.
The tours have stopped for the moment. So, too, has the former inspectorate that was housed throughout the Thatcher years on the same campus. Its staff were almost all ex-Windscale personnel, which created obvious problems of adjudication. That close collegiality between inspectors and inspected lies at the heart of Sellafield's management failure: peer group empathy enabled bad practices to develop for nearly 40 years.
Peer group review problems were addressed to some extent by the restructured NII. However, the British government's plans to part-privatise Sellafield are the immediate stimulus to the current controversy, because they are the spur to increased surveillance there.
Sellafield became wealthy by reprocessing the waste that most other industrialised countries did not want to keep anywhere near its citizens. As waste-reprocessing is a changing game, Sellafield is now potentially both an embarrassment and a loss-making venture for the British government.
That offers mixed benefits to Ireland. The least Ireland can demand is that BNFL gets its act together, which would reduce the health and safety risks to Irish waters, landscape and people. If, however, part-privatisation takes place without Ireland achieving all its objectives, assuming governments and NGOs can agree them, then the possibility of negotiating the rest of the agenda with a private company is poor.
Although the British state has built up a rounded portfolio of public-private ventures, recent experiences such as the safety record on the British rail system indicate that if it does not articulate a specific code of safety practice, private or mixed concerns are unlikely to do so.
The nuclear debate once belonged to people who bared their breasts under hot sun at Carnsore Point while Christy Moore sang about power and exploitation. That protest kept Ireland nuclear-free, no mean achievement. While those protesters now prefer to keep their middle-aged breasts to themselves, their young adult children may consign nuclear issues to the same cupboard where the vinyl albums of Taste, Rory Gallagher and Yes gather dust.
Nuclear power is not a retro issue. Bad seas are bad news for the fishing industry; any rumour of contaminated foodstuff threatens agri-produce throughout the east coast. But retro is the best way to describe how the Government deals with nuclear-related topics in practice. Brian Cowen acted not at all on the health implications of nuclear power in his previous office, nor did he commission research on the curious coincidence between certain cancers and the wind direction from Sellafield.
He has not promised, as his predecessor David Andrews did, that joining PfP does not entail having nuclear installations here. Meanwhile, Ireland challenges the Goliath of the nuclear industry in the best way it knows how: the fierce prospect of a junior minister's signature on a piece of recyclable official notepaper. That should really scare them.