Dumping the problem
Bantry has been earmarked for a dump. Local people want to know
why. By Roisin de Rossa
Two weeks ago residents of the quiet seaside town of Bantry
protested outside the County Council office. They symbolically
burned rubbish in the main square demonstrating their anger at a
plan, supported by Cork County Councillors, to build a Solid
Waste Transfer Station right beside the town on the Ropewalk,
within 30 yards of peoples' houses.
Cork, like most other counties in Ireland, is in a mad race to
find a place to put its rubbish. To date the county has relied on
dumps - `landfill sites' - and its annual half a million tons of
garbage (excluding agricultural waste) goes to nine landfill
sites. Four of these are to be shut by next March. The Kinsale
Road site, which takes some 300,000 tons of the city's garbage,
is not expected to last more than two or three years.
Ireland is twenty years behind the EU on its use of landfill
sites, which have been widely condemned as pollutants, health
hazards and eyesores. Last October, Environment Minister Noel
Dempsey announced yet another plan, this time with 15 year waste
disposal targets, to bring Ireland into line with EU waste
management. These targets rely on the three R's of Reducing,
Recycling, and Re-using waste, and aim to cut the use of
landfills from taking over 90% of rubbish to around 60%.
This will mean collection points for garbage all over the
country, where waste can be `compacted' into bales (to fit into a
smaller space) with `thermal treatment' (which, with present
technology, means incineration). These `stations' will be run in
conjunction with a few `super landfill' dumps for the whole
country. The residual rubbish from the `transit stations' will
pile into these super dumps.- which have yet to be located.
Minister Dempsey assigned what he called the `pivotal role' to
implementing all of this to the municipal authorities, and the
Cork County Councillors all thought a ``Waste Transfer Station''
for Bantry was a great idea, in advance of any consultation,
involvement of the people, still less provision to fund separate
collections for different types of waste, or downstream
recycling.
``The first I heard of the plan was from a neighbour. No one
thought to come and talk to us,`` says Jud Weidner of the Ropewalk
Residents Association. The council commissioned a report from
Tobin Environmental Services, in Ballsbridge, but, Jud says,
``they never even came near us. None of us. Yet there are people
living here, right next door to where they intend to have the
rubbish dump of West Cork. They never spoke to one of us. It was
a `Desk Report', the Council said.''
Yet it was only last June that the Government formally signed up
to the international convention on citizens' environmental
rights, which guarantees citizens the right to information on
their environment and the right to participate in decision
making. Cork County Councillors however seem to have been happy
to vote their approval, in the absence of any consultation
whatsoever.
Bantry Solid Waste Transfer Station is the first of five planned
for West Cork. The Tobin Study announced that the next one is for
Clonakilty, which needs to be ready for operation by the time the
Benduff Landfill closes, at the start of 2001.
The proposal talks about not only compacting and baling rubbish
trucked into the station, but of incinerating the dry fraction in
order ``to facilitate energy recovery and to further reduce the
quantities disposed to landfill.''
``They are quite clearly planning to build an incinerator right
here in our town,'' says Sinn Fein's Anne O'Leary, one of the
Bantry Town's Commissioners.
``There was a general understanding in the town that if we didn't
agree to the Ropewalk site, then there were other possible sites
in the town, like Slip, Rennroue, Shaskin, Shandrun under
consideration. It was scaremongering, to encourage people to back
the plan for fear they'd get a `civic amenity' right on their own
doorsteps. When Assistant County Manager, Mr Deasy, came over to
answer our questions on the proposal, I asked him who picked out
the site, and he confirmed that it was the County Council. No
other area was under serious consideration. Apart from any other
reason the council owns the 7.5 acre site,'' Anne O'Leary says.
``The Report itself is just full of holes,'' says Jud Weidner.
``They don't even observe their own criteria. They say that siting
because of noise, refuse, rats and obnoxious odours, should be
well away from housing, yet people live only 20 and 30 yards away
from the proposed site. They say that a site near to heavy
industry would be preferable to one near light industry, yet this
site is part of a light industry Enterprise centre, where some
200 people work. A new company, Schaefer Electronics, which is
considering coming to the site, is now expressing serious
concern,'' Jud explains.
The site is 300 yards away from Bantry House, which is a well
known beauty spot and tourist attraction. (The house belonged to
the English ascendancy in the form of Shelswell White, but it was
never burnt out because, local history has it, their wives were
nice to the people in famine times.) Famous gardens lie below the
warehouse in which the municipal waste of West Cork is to be
compacted and stored.
The Report proposes that ``the washing down of the transfer
station and the run-off from the hazardous waste collection area
of the civic amenity site, should be to a foul sewer.'' So it
should. This is the first mention of hazardous waste and its
collection. What sort of `hazardous waste' do they expect to see
at this facility is one of 35 questions which Jud put to the
Assistant County Manager.
Why choose a beautiful and historic seaside town, which attracts
many tourists, as the county dump?
``Why,'' asks Anne O'Leary, ``when there is a quarry, Adrigole, only
18 miles up the road, where there is no visual impact, and no
houses nearby?'' At the moment nobody quite knows.
After the Bettelgeuse disaster at Whiddy Island, Bantry, through
the efforts of its resourceful people, has built itself not only
as a major tourist attraction but as a town which offers
employment and even the chance for its children to stay. In
addition to the Enterprise Centre, the town has an expanding
mussel farming and processing industry, and a popular VTOS
telecommunications course in the hope of making Bantry a
telecommunications call centre.
But there is no way that this town is going to lie down before
the designs of the planners. ``It's the contempt with which they
(the council) have treated us. Without so much as a by your
leave, they want to turn us into the West Cork County dump,'' says
Jud Weidner. ``We haven't even got militant yet!''
The Bantry experience underlines just how the best of intentions
to reduce and reuse or recycle the mounting waste in Ireland, can
be undermined and negated by local council high handedness.
``Instead of gathering the people together, discussing the
problems of waste disposal in Ireland, and the need to move away
from landfill sites, the municipal authority, backed by all the
elected councillors, has leapt into a situation without any
consultation or education and stirred justifiable fear that an
incinerator is to be placed next door to their houses to dispose
of West County Cork's garbage,'' says Anne O'Leary. ``It's not the
people who need education on environment and waste management but
the planners, the county managers and most of all the
councillors, who need to recognise the need for consultation with
people.''
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