ABSTRACT
During the greater part of 1988, a group of independent property-owning families in east County Cork, in the Republic of Ireland, found their agricultural way of life and their rural environment to be under threat from an American multinational corporation. The corporate enterprise Merrell Dow—part of the Dow Chemical empire—proposed to locate a £30-million chemical factory in the midst of their prosperous dairy-farming region. Since the factory would without question produce prodigious quantities of effluent and waste, the local population felt that the threat of pollution to their environment was considerable. Despite there being no precedent for such a development in rural Cork, Merrell Dow’s proposal was fully supported by national and regional institutions of the Irish state, including Cork County Council which, with undue haste, granted the corporation planning permission.
