Pic from Belfast Live
In Tuesday 8th June 2021’s edition of The Irish News, I was horrified to find a 2-page advertisement emblazoned across pages 8 and 9 by the Dalradian Gold mining company. It seems that The Irish News has been guffawed into promoting unchecked claims by the mining corporation. The ads claim that “We are building livelihoods” and that “Modern mining brings prosperity.” These are certainly true of the Orion Resource Partner shareholders in Canada and across the world, the overlords of the project, but of the communities in Greencastle, Co. Tyrone and across Mid Ulster, these ads could not be further from the truth.
Dalradian, of course, ignore that their scheming thus far has resulted in the arrests of activists against the mining, and harassment of these activists by the PSNI and anonymous troublemakers for several years. These local people risk having their farmland destroyed by the mining itself, not to mention the permanent and catastrophic damage that industrial gold mining leaves behind to fresh water and the atmosphere. As recently as this week, The Guardian reported on the destructive impact of mining on communities in the Pacific Islands. The nature of “trickle down economics” means that less than 1% of the wealth generated from such projects has been enjoyed in local communities. In Papua New Guinea, the Ok Tedi mine, closed for over 20 years, is still discharging millions of tonnes of poisoned and contaminated water each year.
The claims by Dalradian have to be checked and contextualised instead of being presented or published without any credible sources for their claims. According to The Irish News advertising costs, the paper will have received £7,400 for the 2-page ad alone. A drop in the ocean for a multi-billionaire corporation floating in tax havens in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Everyone, it seems, has their asking price.
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