Eddie O’Connor’s comments at the recent Climate Action Conference in Dublin were outrageous, the more so because they were made by someone who has, directly and indirectly, been a global leader in working towards an amelioration of the greatest threat that Africa has ever faced.

This is not to excuse the comments he made. They were inaccurate but it was their deep insensitivity that I found most striking given the consistent attention I’ve observed him pay to the welfare of the communities Mainstream Power works with across the globe, including in Africa.

It is not an overstatement to place his legacy as among the most important, globally, of those focused on slowing the inexorable march of the climate crisis. Few places will escape nature’s wrath, but Africa is most prone, hopelessly exposed to the ravages of the climate unless remedial actions are taken. A recent report by the respected Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) estimates that up to 1.2 billion people will be displaced from their homes on account of climate by 2050. Minimal estimates are at half of that and of the 19 countries most at risk, eleven are in Africa. 

The UN reported that in 2020 the number of people displaced by climate events – 30 million – outstripped, for the first time, those who fled home because of war or violence.

Eddie O’Connor has been on this case most of his professional life. As a business leader, for at least three decades, he has dedicated himself to challenging the egregious, utterly immoral, behaviour of the leadership cohort in the fossil fuel industry. In the late 20th century, the boards of global corporate giants like Shell, BP, Exon Mobil, buried reports that they had commissioned which predicted the climate Armageddon that is now fast approaching. They and the governments that supported them, most especially the United States, put the welfare of communities across the world, but most especially in Africa, on death row. 

Eddie O’Connor’s vision of the potential for renewable sources of energy to help address the climate crisis has done more for the people of Africa than is quantifiable. Nor did it end with his vision; his business, Mainstream Renewable Power, has committed considerable resources to Africa’s people – whether that’s the Ashanti in Ghana, communities across the largely Christian South Africa or the Islamic state of Egypt – and every step of the way its work has been marked by a deep respect for their traditions and cultures. 

Words do matter and it will take many more of them over the weeks and months ahead for the correction to happen and the for the hurt to pass. 

I saw this up close. I sat on one board sub-committee where I regularly witnessed his focus on not just the people where we were doing development but the protection, often the enhancement, of the natural environment which was part of their heritage. Respect for people and planet was and continues to be part of the Mainstream DNA.

So what was he thinking? To profile a whole continent of 54 countries as he did was uniformed, sweeping and offensive. It also smacked of a superiority that’s completely at odds with the culture of the business that he founded and led for the past dozen years. The former colonial powers thought they could and should civilise Africa, to an extent the Christian churches thought the same while the newer colonial influences, China and Russia among them, chose to simply steal its natural resources. 

The consistent thread through all of these endeavours – political, religious, state-sponsored criminality – is a sense of superiority. Eddie O’Connor’s comments had that same sense of pre-eminence.

Within weeks of completing the sale of the company at a valuation of €1billion, his remarks at the Dublin conference were the business or reputational equivalent of that old football line about ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’. It has done immediate damage to the reputation of the now Aker-owned Mainstream in which he retains a substantial interest but what will upset him more is that some of the people who his brilliance has empowered are very hurt and also confused by what he said. These are all uncomfortable truths that arise from his aberration.

Mainstream has over 80 African employees and many hundreds more who work for contractors which, in the business of renewable energy production, are members of your extended family. All of these people will have felt the sharpness of his assessment; they will wonder if it’s really how he, or worse still the company, view them or certainly their community? It is not, of course, but words do matter and it will take many more of them over the weeks and months ahead for the correction to happen and for the hurt to pass. 

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There are a number of areas worthy of further consideration.

The first is the continent of Africa itself. It is one of the places on the planet most at risk from the climate crisis, indeed the most recent IEP report identifies three regions of the world that are at greatest risk of a climate catastrophe two of which are sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa. It is a vast continent, home to 54 different nations and about one billion people.

In Dictatorland, the Men who Stole Africa, the BBC’s Paul Kenyon writes how some are dealing with a present that’s as challenging and complex as the past so to even consider the future is, in many cases, beyond difficult. It is important to note, as Kenyon does, that some African countries were, post-colonial rule, ravaged by the very men who had delivered independence. Where this occurred it represented such a betrayal that the people, their societies, have found it almost as difficult to trust their own, as outside influences. While, more recently, real economic and social progress has been made in many African nations, the emerging climate disaster is so threatening that more interventions seem inevitable.

This is the context in which Mainstream and Eddie O’Connor are relevant to Africa’s challenges early in the 21st century. For generations energy companies that went there had only one interest, to take as much of value as possible at the lowest possible cost. This is not just a feature of colonised Africa, the more contemporary version, in oil and exploration, involved some of the world’s largest companies raiding the continent’s natural resources in the pursuit of excessive profitability. Not only was most of the economic benefit residing outside Africa but the very nature of what they did, the purpose of the fossil fuel industry, is the biggest single contributor to the climate crisis that now threatens to overwhelm the one billion people who live on the continent.

Mainstream Renewable Power was established to lead what Eddie always described as the ‘global transition to renewable energy’. I was proud to be its first chair and even in those early years it was clear that his ambition was an unusual blend of the commercial with the spiritual. In this sense at least; there could never be any compromise on the transformational piece, on it being a global force for good within energy creation and within that to recognise where there were opportunities that they must be exploited in partnership with local communities.

The company’s first commitment to Africa was in 2009, a year after it was formed. It is the second largest developer of renewable energy in South Africa and has a very significant presence in Egypt. In Senegal, its windfarm provides clean energy to more than two million people but, as critically, these developments and more in Africa, all inspired by Eddie O’Connor’s vision and his hands-on leadership, are delivered with a level of care for the communities it serves that is exceptional.

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“Eddie is an evangelist. I and others, including many of those who had invested in Airtricity, followed his lead because, with him, that’s just what you do.”

It is also important to try to understand the nature of Eddie O’Connor.  I first met and worked with him in the early 1990s, when he was CEO of Bord na Mona.  One of the reasons he was ousted from that role, in a grubby, politically-motivated coup, was a speech he gave where he questioned the value of elements in the Irish public service. There was truth to much of his argument, but it lacked nuance or appreciation of some of the difficulties inherent in public service.

Being fired was the best thing that happened to him. Bord na Mona was too small a place for someone with such an exceptional intellect in his sphere, an extraordinary work ethic and immense ambition. One thing that fascinated me about him then was how small a part money played in that ambition. Eddie wanted to change the world so though Airtricity, which he’d founded in 1997, was sold a decade later for around €2 billion, he earned only €50 million. What’s more, even though he was into his sixties, the ink was barely dry on that deal when he set up Mainstream and promptly committed in excess of €30 million of his own proceeds into the new venture.

The world of business has very few like Eddie O’Connor, people who have pursued profit while always putting the wellbeing of the planet and of its people centre-stage.

Eddie is an evangelist. I and others, including many of those who had invested in Airtricity, followed his lead because, with him, that’s just what you do. There is a problem with evangelists though because, often, in the certainty of their view and the energy of their delivery, they oversimplify their argument or the ‘call to arms’. 

I have looked at the clip of the conference where he said what he did and I recognise something in it. I’ve seen it; the calm forcefulness where he asserts an important point but overstates it and ultimately loses the argument. I have been his interlocutor on occasion where I’ve been on the ropes only for evangelistic Eddie to overstretch his point and, in the process, save me. We’re both strong minded men who have had many disagreements but it is, I think, a feature of some of his dialogue to generalise or to extrapolate from one instant or example to make a more wide-ranging argument. 

When days after it had occurred, I reviewed his comments I thought that was what Eddie O’Connor had done in that moment at the Dublin Climate Action Conference. It’s not to excuse it but to try to understand it in the context of the personal diligence with which he has approached the company’s work in societies and communities in Africa.

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There is, for me, a certain irony in the title of the conference – Climate Action – at which he made those fateful remarks.  Recently The Guardian newspaper made an editorial decision to replace the term ‘climate-change’ with ‘climate-crisis’. As a subscriber, I approve of such editorial refinement because words really do matter. So, that Eddie O’Connor has faced such criticism and had to resign his position as chair of Mainstream for what he said is sad for him and those close to him.  That his words don’t reflect the reality of how he has conducted himself in pursuing success for Mainstream doesn’t alter that the criticism was merited and the resignation, probably, inevitable.

Mainstream’s CEO, Mary Quaney, received a message on LinkedIn late last Thursday night from someone whom she doesn’t know. It read, ‘Hello Mary.  I imagine you have had a tough week.  I am currently touring the Northern Cape in South Africa and an NGO I fund. I visited projects today which you (Mainstream) also fund.  I thought you might enjoy hearing “Thank You” for the incredible work you support in Africa.”

The world of business has very few like Eddie O’Connor, people who have pursued profit while always putting the wellbeing of the planet and of its people centre-stage. In my experience, business has a surplus of those who talk up their wider societal concerns but do little about them. So, for all the offence caused by Eddie’s comments at this conference let’s remember its purpose was climate action and in that far more critical regard, the actions of his business, uniquely inspired by his personal drive, his commitment and some of his personal wealth have delivered fundamental improvement to the lives of millions across Africa. I have no doubt that this episode, one of his own making, will only strengthen his resolve in that regard.

Fintan Drury is an occasional contributor to The Currency. He was Chairman of Mainstream Renewable Power from its establishment in 2008 until 2011 and he re-joined the board in 2017 serving as a non-executive director through to its recent sale to Aker Horizons.