London, England - WAS it a case of mind over matter? A tiny company set up by two Irish women and three geologists in 2002 has struck oil in Belize, with the help of controversial lifestyle guru Tony Quinn.
Succeeding where multibillion dollar corporations had failed, the company has found commercial quantities of high-quality crude in the small Central American state, population 290,000. They claim their success was partly due to a mind-training course from Quinn.
Belize Natural Energy (BNE), backed by American and Irish investors, claims to have found so much oil that the Belize government reckons its 7.5% cut from the discovery will pay the entire national budget for a year.
A succession of oil majors quit the country in disappointment after failing to find a gusher, but BNE scored three times in its first three attempts, and the government believes it could soon be producing 20,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd).
Enniskillen-born Sheila McCaffrey, a director of BNE, said the company’s success was not pot luck.
“Seven years ago I trained with Tony Quinn; it was an absolute transformation. It completely changed my life and it’s the only reason I’m in Belize today,” she said last week.
“The history showed us that 50 companies failed spectacularly to find anything commercial, with a budget line from the 1950s to the 1990s of hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Quinn’s philosophy, which promotes what he calls “mind technology”, has been criticised as brainwashing but is defended by adherents as positive and life-changing.
Complaints about Quinn’s techniques have come from the likes of Dialogue Ireland, a cult watchdog, which says seminars in the Bahamas costing €18,500 are proof of the “idiot effect” — “the phenomenon of entrepreneurs losing the plot and direction in life when they pay inflated prices for courses available for a few euros in a paperback”.