I think I am gonna kill the developers.

The problem is this, the owner hasnt got CREATE TRIGGER privs however the owner owns 50 triggers (that part is what puzzles me). It ends up that all tables they use in triggers has public synonyms (or all prefixed with owner name such as owner.table) and all triggers are created by system by running create triggers owner.trg_name (oh my god), since one public synonym was missing when I import the schema one trigger couldnt be compiled so I took the create trigger code and ran in sqlplus as the owner, obviously I should have run the SQL as system!

OMG!!!