Chinese lithium miners ‘threaten Wicklow Way’
Community group warns drilling project will be ‘massively detrimental’ to the local environment
A COMMUNITY group taking on a Chinese-owned company prospecting for lithium on the Wicklow Way said the project would be ‘massively detrimental’ to the environment if it gets the green light.
Anthony McNulty, chairman of the Protect Moylisha Hill group, said locals have repeatedly had the wool pulled over their eyes during development stages.
Blackstairs Lithium Company has been test-drilling for lithium and other minerals in counties Wicklow and Carlow intermittently since acquiring an initial prospecting licence in 2009.
The company’s majority shareholder is Chinese giant Ganfeng Lithium, the world’s largest lithium mining company with a market value of around €35bn, and suppliers for rechargeable batteries to Tesla and Volkswagen. Blackstairs is also partly owned by the Canadabased International Lithium.
The company recently applied to the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications for a renewal of its prospecting licence, which allows it to explore for lithium on several sites along a 50km belt that encompasses more than 150 townlands.
The State-owned forestry company Coillte owns several commercial forests in the area.
Aside from blemishing one of the country’s most popular nature trails, Mr McNulty says a mining project could contaminate local water supplies, harming biodiversity and affecting farms.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘There’s a registered aquifer up there that could feed farms and home wells up to 20 miles away. There are species up there which are red-listed, whose habitat as it is would be gone.
‘The community absolutely lives up there, and we have people who come from all around the country to walk up there. That would all be gone.’
Mr McNulty first encountered Blackstairs in 2018 after hearing reports of activity at night on Moylisha Hill.
He recalls: ‘I went up and investigated and found the drilling equipment. I was like “What’s going on?” And then I went looking and eventually found this guy John Harrop, who was the lead geologist for International Lithium.
‘He said, “We’re just looking at the moment, we haven’t found much”. But yet when I went
looking on the internet their former chief Kirrill Klip was saying they’d struck gold at Moylisha.’
However, when contacted by the MoS, Mr Harrop denied Mr McNulty’s claims the company was working in the area at night.
Mr Harrop, who is now working in a consultancy role for Blackstairs, also said he would not wish to be involved with a project that wasn’t ‘win-win’.
He told the MoS: ‘Unless it can be demonstrated that an operation would have extremely low risk of detrimental effects a mining permit cannot be issued.
‘One of the attractions of Europe, and this obviously includes Ireland, is that there is the technical, legal and political ability to regulate and enforce this. Increasing awareness in the consumer market is that the raw materials we are using daily need to come from clean and responsibly-operated sources.’
Despite concerns from locals and disappointment at a lack of consultation, Mr McNulty says Blackstairs shareholders were informed there was ‘neutral to positive feedback in the area’.
But he insisted: ‘There’s no positivity here.’
When this was put to Mr Harrop, he replied: ‘The shareholders of Blackstairs are well aware of the range of reactions along that 50 km belt and over the time we have been working there.
‘Reaction along the 50km has generally been neutral to positive, with some specific negative reactions and we simply do not work on that land.’
In the past 12 months Ganfeng Lithium has purchased mining companies in Argentina, Canada, Mali and Mexico. Mr Harrop said it would be like ‘apples and oranges’ to compare those to this project.
‘There’s a perception that it’s much more advanced than it really is,’ he told the MoS.
‘It’s something they got involved in over ten years ago and I don’t know if they would now, because it’s so early a stage. What you see them picking up internationally is advanced projects where there is a resource and there may even be a reserve.
‘There are too many bad stories about mining around but we still need the material. It’s not at all that people in my industry don’t recognise the validity of the issues being raised – we do. And we would like to see them addressed. But communicating that is a challenge.’
And Mr Harrop insisted he is ‘not at all’ confident that lithium will ever be mined on Moylisha Hill.
A Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications spokesman confirmed to the MoS that the Geoscience Regulation Office is considering an application by Blackstairs for a two-year renewal of its prospecting licences in Wicklow and Carlow.
He stressed that a prospecting licence ‘only relates to the activity of exploring for minerals and does not give the licence holder permission to undertake mining’.
He added: ‘In the event that Blackstairs Lithium Ltd identifies an economically viable lithium deposit, it would need to apply for a number of additional consents prior to mining being permitted.
‘These include planning permission from the relevant local authority and an Integrated Pollution Control (IPC) or Industrial Emissions (IE) Licence from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
‘Both the planning and IPC/IE licensing processes provide for public consultation and full environmental impact assessment.’
‘The red-listed species up there would be gone’
‘There’s a perception it’s more advanced than it is’