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TWO brothers from Westmeath are to legally challenge the State for not granting them a license to produce biodiesel, even though they have been making the environmentally-friendly product from waste chip shop oil for almost three years.  Engineers John and Tommy Newman, who have been running Newman Biodiesel Ltd at their self-built plant near Tyrellspass since February 2005, are taking their case after being twice refused a license under the Biodiesel Excise Relief Scheme in 2005 and 2006.

Tommy did a final year project on biodiesel while completing his chemical engineering degree at UCD, and he came up with the idea of producing bio-diesel. John explained, "We produced a small amount, tried it out and we were very impressed with the way it worked. After that we built a small plant on a 2.2 acre site as an experiment, without getting planning permission." Biodiesel can be made from vegetable oils or animal fats, and it reduces carbon emissions by approximately 80%. The Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources launched the first Biofuel Excise Relief Scheme in April 2005. Three companies from 22 applicants were issued with licenses to produce biodiesel. The Newmans were angry that they were refused a license during the first scheme, so they worked diligently to ensure their success in the second scheme in 2006. They were again refused and their anger has been augmented by their claims that a number of companies given licenses in the first scheme did not meet their target quotas for the production of biodiesel, but still had their licenses renewed. John told the Sunday Tribune: "It is really unfair for companies to be given licenses last year even though they did not meet their production quotas in the first scheme the previous year. We are annoyed that we have applied twice and not been given a license. It is really detrimental to competition in the biofuel market. "As we have no license, we have been refused bank loans to develop our plant, we have been denied local authority and EPA grants and we are unable to trade in carbon credits." A senior legal source explained that the Newmans' legal action would challenge, "whether the manner in which the licenses were granted was lawful and whether the quota system is anti-competitive under Irish and EU law. "It may also challenge whether the exemption from excise to a select group is an unlawful State aid to industry and whether the scheme contravenes the Newmans' constitutional right to earn a livelihood." It is also understood that the Newmans' legal challenge will look into, "what the minister's obligations are when people who have been given licenses do not produce their allotted quota to the detriment of other producers." Conor McMorrow  © Sunday Tribune 22.01.08

"Southen Hotel where the Taoiseach's car purrs in wait. He leaves the Square, passing a newsagents with Playboy in its window and packets of condoms arrayed cheek-by-jowl with the cigarettes behind the counter. He is one of the few who do not break their stride to check the properties on display in the estate agent's. Today there is a photograph of a nondescript cottage on half-an-acre out in Bushy Park (Galway). The price guide says £350,000. The house, which will probably be demolished by whoever buys it in favour of something befitting the cost, commands panoramic views of the cut of the river, Lough Corrib, and the first green of the local golf course.

There is a more modest proposition too: a detached four-bed in Ballybrit. ``Sold,'' says Mister Fitzgerald, the auctioneer, ``for £150,000.'' Mister Fitzgerald is preparing to leave the office in the capable care of his front desk manager as he heads to Ballybrit with the rest of the multitude. He expects `the whole town' will shut down in his absence. ``There won't be a solicitor to be got,'' he promises.

It is Race Week in Galway. Every hotel and B&B is booked to capacity within a 30 mile radius. Human shapes swarm across the landscape like vertical ants. Jaguars with their chrome namesakes rearing on the bonnets, BMWs and Renault Clios crawl bumper-to-bumper on every approach road to the race track, passing the leafy business park where the workers in Boston Scientific and Compaq map out tomorrow's world. A distant hum grows to a deafening roar as, over the brow of a hill, a platoon of helicopters appears like props from Apocalypse Now.

As far back as Enfield, on the other side of the country, a giant billboard advertising Aer Arann's five daily flights had taunted: Had you chosen to fly to Galway you'd be there now. There is a park 'n' fly service ferrying race-goers from the Galway Bay Golf & Country Club to Ballybrit at £60-a-person. Westair ploughs another chopper route from the Connemara Coast and Glenlo Abbey hotels. Great care has been taken to help the punters spend their money. In the champagne tent once the preserve of the gentry and the wealthy at race meetings £48 magnum bottles of Moet et Chandon are pouring faster than did the rain the first two days. The press of bodies makes breathing a luxury.

This is Europe's biggest race festival. And, by the end of the week, it is a racing certainty for inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records: biggest crowds, biggest tote, biggest hats, biggest bookies' grins. Not to mention biggest brags. Some people take inordinate pleasure from the roll call of records as if simply participating in the excesses of the Celtic Tiger were affirmation of their worth. Boastfulness could yet supplant begrudgery as the national trait in the third millennium.

This is Middle Ireland at play, keener on craic than conversation and happy to laugh at itself, as long as the joke was intended. It is middle-aged, what now passes for middle-income, and middle-brow. In the hospitality village, under the sort of pleated silken tents Lawrence of Arabia would have felt at home in, the self-enriched unwind with their private tote access and carpeted portaloos. The scene evokes little of the Dev-style ambience immortalised by The Galway Races.

It's there you'll see the pipers and the fiddlers competing

The nimble-footed dancers a-tripping over the daisies

There were others crying cigars and likes, and bills for all the races

With the colours of the jockeys and the price and horses' ages ...

The Government Chief Whip, Seamus Brennan, used to sell race cards here at the age of 15. Now he like his Cabinet colleagues mingling between tables on their first full week's holidays hosts what is probably the single most fruitful fund-raising event of the year. Fianna Fail has colonised the Galway Races with far greater efficacy than perfidious Albion's assault on Connacht. ``It's a kinda natural fit,'' believes the Minister for the Millennium.

This year, for the first time, their supporters have suckled on pesto lamb and Liberatas cabernet sauvignon for four days on the trot. With 900 guests paying £250-a-plate, the takings would come in at close to £ million. It makes a reassuring tinkle in the kitty after a summer of election-talk and with rumours circulating in the marquee that Charlie McCreevy has already been spotted canvassing in Kildare.

But its the PR exercise that is the real pay-back here. Rubber-necking the power boys in Fianna Fail is no longer an end in itself. Neither is it enough to say you got a lousy tip from Jim McDaid or that Joe Walsh eschewed the beef for the smoked salmon (he didn't). This year, it is all about defiance. With the Moriarty and Flood tribunals in summer abeyance, Galway is a chance for a little political realignment. ``Somebody said to me here yesterday that he'd been a Fianna Fail supporter all his life and he wasn't going to start pretending now that he wasn't,'' Seamus Brennan argues when it is suggested that some of the cameos around the marquee are surreal.

As he speaks, the Minister for Sport and a bow-hatted Caroline Bailey of Flood Tribunal fame are bent over a race card. Her brother-in-law, Bovale's Mick Bailey has already regaled the masses with a rousing rendition in the winners enclosure of The West's Awake. At the table immediately inside the tent's entry flap, Bertie Ahern is standing behind Celia Larkin's chair, replenishing her glass. They are guests of David McKenna who runs the phenomenally successful Marlborough Group and who has been known to fly Bertie to Old Trafford for the occasional football match. Also at their table is Des Richardson, the Taoiseach's old friend and Fianna Fail's former fund-raiser who memorably introduced Liam Lawlor to the casino in the Phoenix Park consortium.

This is the slice of corporate Ireland that made its own headlines when the Public Offices Commission investigated Fianna Fail's late disclosure four years ago of an £11,250 pick-me-up contribution by Frank Dunlop & Associates for the races' catering firm, Lydon House. It was here too that one of Charlie Haughey's benefactors, Patrick Gallagher, proposed marriage to his girlfriend after his release from jail in Northern Ireland on a fraud conviction.

At the Moriarty Tribunal, the septuagenarian beef baron, Seamus Purcell, revealed that he had been sent a bill after chartering a Celtic Helicopters flight to the Galway Races even though he had given £12,000 to the company at the behest of the former Taoiseach.

Among the familiar faces dotted around Fianna Fail's marquee now are the builder, Bernard McNamara, who won the contract for the new Dail extension, the IFA's Tom Parlon and Sean Mulryan, developer of the controversial Baldoyle Racecourse.

The estate agent, Sherry FitzGerald, has taken two tables and it rival, Gunne, has one. Others are taken by Anglo-Irish Bank, the ESB, Durkan Brothers, FBD,Albert Reynolds' C&D and Ladbrokes. Outside in the sunshine, the Minister for Finance is chatting to the bookmaker Joe Donnelly and his wife, Marie; a golden couple rated in an English glossy as being among the top 10 art patrons and building ``the British Isles' biggest contemporary mansion'' on the Vico Road. The lunchtime radio news has been full of conjecture about Garda Jerry McCabe's killers but, here in Ballybrit's hospitality village, the Minister for Justice sups a pint of Guinness and recalls his favourite extracts from the prose of his fellow Kerryman, Con Houlihan.

Was it only last year the Taoiseach pronounced that the Galway Races brought the coalition together? This year Mary Harney is holidaying in Connemara. She and Bertie place a choreographed wager for the news cameras, then they return to their respective tents. It would not do for the Tanaiste to be seen fraternising at a Fianna Fail fund-raiser. But, while she repairs to another marquee, two former general secretaries of the PDs, Michael Parker and Garvan McGinley, rub shoulders under the senior government partner's canvass.

If the motherland's cities have inherited her gender, then Galway is the party girl of Ireland. In the windy old town, where the maidens have been deemed suspect by a local judge, race-goers pile into restaurants reeking of garlic and later, tradition has it, queue up for the poker schools in various hotels. It seems the day is not long enough to spend all their money.

Gerry Devaney has been selling saddles and bridles in Eyre Square since 1966 and he is not impressed with the turn-of-the century race festival. ``The Celtic Tiger is doing favours for the rich but it certainly does nothing for the poor,'' he moaned on Thursday as women in ridiculous headgear teetered past his stall. ``They're spending all their money on gambling. It's soft money.''

In the current edition of Conde Nast's Traveller magazine, Daniel Day Lewis' sister, Tamasin, writes this about Galway: ``It is 18 months since I was last there, and it is clear that the city is currently in a state of flux. Two cranes, giraffe-necked, stalk the sky, dwarfing the fat, green-onion dome of the cathedral, and a new one-way system swirls us past new apartment blocks jostling to catch sight of the bay... In its hurry to embrace a culture of newness, youth, space and design, it appears to have mislaid its past, except in the alleys that pour down to the Spanish Arch and out into Galway Bay.''

Driving eastwards after Ladies Day, slowed by the merciless traffic, it is impossible not to notice the portrait of Charlie Haughey. The familiar eyes stare balefully from an antique shop window in Loughrea. The framed painting rests on a gilt-legged chair with oyster satin upholstery. What is remarkable is that it remains unsold, for it is a powerful image."