5. The Government

• On November 15th, two days after the tanker ran into trouble, Henrique López Veiga, fisheries minister of the Galician regional government, stated that the risk of oil being washed up on the shore was 'not very high'.
• On November 16th, just three days before the tanker split in half and went down, Arsenio Fernández de Mesa, delegate in Galicia from the Spanish government, stated that 'there is no imminent risk of the tanker splitting'.
• On November 17th, three days after the tanker started leaving a deadly trail of thousands of tonnes of oil, which was bound to be washed up on our shores, Manuel Fraga, head of the Galician regional government, and two of his ministers took a day off work and went on a hunting trip in Aranjuez, in central Spain, about 400 miles away from Galicia's capital, Santiago de Compostela.
• On November 22nd, Spain's deputy prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, dismissed the French and Portuguese reports that the sunken tanker was still leaking oil and assured that, according to the technical reports commissioned by the Spanish government, the oil left in the wreck would solidify and there would not be any more spillages.
• On December 14th, almost a month after the sinking of the Prestige, the prime minister made his first visit to Galicia to apologise to residents for a lack of resources. However, he defended his handling of the spill, which he has described as Spain biggest-ever ecological disaster.
• The Spanish government has been criticised by international salvage experts for its decision to tow the Prestige out to sea rather than in to a port or sheltered waters, where an attempt could have been made to pump at least some of the heavily contaminating oil out of its tanks.
• So far no government minister, not even a second-rank official, has had the decency to resign. The prime minister himself has backed all his ministers.

Be careful not to step on the oil (The Spanish environment minister)

Don't worry, be happy (The mayor of A Coruña, the Spanish prime minister and his deputy)

What am I doing here? I wish I were hunting (The head of the Galician regional government)