ONE HUNDRED and twenty acres of decaying food scraps, rotting peelings and soiled plastic nappies. Unless they can stop the Superdump proposed for their backyard, that’s what the inhabitants of Kill’s hinterland have to look forward to until well into the next millennium. It is not a pleasant prospect.
Just over a month ago, An Bord Pleanála, the State planning appeals board, decided to sanction the Superdump, which will allow the local authorities of Dublin to transport half a million tones of baled waste from the capital to Kildare, every year for a decade.
That means a total of over five million tonnes of baled waste will be packed into the disused quarry at Arthurstown during the lifespan of the dump.
No rural town should have to endure several million tonnes of rubbish from a city in another county being dumped in its hinterland, but Kill seems particularly undeserving of such a fate. It’s been the Tidy Towns winner in Kildare for the last twelve years, and came second in the national competition once.
It is all deeply, horribly ironic. During the eighties, the future development of Kill looked rosy. Being a scenic rural town which was no more than an hour’s drive to the capital, it seemed the nineties might be a-booming. Now, the only development Kill is likely to see over the next ten years is a dump, itself the area of a good-sized village.
The need for a huge ‘Superdump’ like the one proposed for Kill arose because Dublin’s existing landfill sites within the county boundaries have only two more years before they are exhausted.
As Dublin Green TD, Trevor Sargent puts it: “It’s a panic situation because the Dublin local authorities have nowhere to put the rubbish. The Achilles heel of the consumer society has always been that, as prosperity rises, the waste mountain grows too.”
THE HISTORY OF THE SUPERDUMP
Almost nine years ago, the disused quarry at Arthurstown near Kill was first identified as a possible site for the disposal of the capital’s waste.
Back then, it was a private subcontractor called Rent-a-Bin who sought planning permission to dump baled domestic and commercial waste in Arthurstown. Rent-a-Bin had the backing of the local authority in Dublin, who were willing to subcontract waste collection and disposal to the company at the time.
However, Kildare Co. Council attached such a large number of conditions to the granting of planning permission that the idea became economically unviable for a private company, and the development never went ahead.
For a brief interlude, it seemed as if the people of Kildare had won the battle against an enormous dump being developed just hundreds of yards from some of their farms and homes. However, with each passing week, the lack of landfill space in Dublin became a more and more pressing problem for the Dublin authorities. Dublin’s population of one million wanted their rubbish collected and disposed of, but they didn’t want it dumped nearby.
Unsurprisingly, the idea of the disused quarry in Kill being used for the dump came into focus again. South Dublin Co. Council, acting on behalf of the Dublin local authorities, applied to Kildare County Council for planning permission to dump baled waste in the site at Arthurstown. Kildare Co. Council refused permission for the development, mainly on environmental grounds.
Knowing that there was nowhere else to turn, and that their three existing landfill sites were filling up at a rate of knots, South Dublin Co. Council lodged an appeal with An Bord Pleanála last year.
There followed the longest oral hearing in the board’s history, stretching to 25 days. At the hearing, the inspector, Padraig Thornton, was told that the site was geologically unsuitable for the dump because the bedrock was cracked, and consequently there would be seepage from the dump into water strata which ran into rivers that supplied Dublin’s water supply. The site was also prone to flooding and would cost several millions to be made safe. Anti-dump groups further pointed out that the proposed site was only thirty metres from the edge of one of several stud farms in the area, some of which were home to horses worth millions of pounds.
Locals felt they had won the hearing hands down. South Dublin County Council had been caught with its pants down on several issues, the most farcical being the omission of a number of local farms in their agricultural report.
Yet when An Bord Pleanála announced its decision six months later, it was that the dump could go ahead subject to twenty-six conditions.
The conditions imposed included:
• An order that site works be carried out, including control of waste water and gas emissions. The land involved would also have to be landscaped and rehabilitated.
• Only baled municipal waste would be permitted to be dumped at Arthurstown, with the public being forbidden from dumping there.
• The dump would have a maximum lifespan of ten years and the baled waste would have to be transported in covered lorries only between the hours of 8.30am and 6pm from Monday to Saturday.
• The worked area would have to be covered every evening and the gas generated from the baled waste would have to be flared off.
• No waste would be deposited within 100ft of agricultural land.
Locals were nonetheless outraged by the Board’s decision and what they perceived as the woolliness of the twenty-six conditions. “We had three or four days of evidence on the geology of the site, yet there’s no reference to geology in the decision,” said Peter Sweetman of the Waste Action Group, immediately after notification of the decision.
Trevor Lyons, of the Kill Dump Action Committee is still seething at the decision three weeks later: “We feel that the whole Bord Pleanála process has been a sham and a mere rubber stamping exercise. We would have done a better job than An Bord Pleanála if we had negotiated conditions with Fingal Council ourselves, especially seeing as the hearing cost us £45,000 which we had to raise ourselves.
“By choosing a geologically dodgy site, Dublin have put themselves up shit creek. The main reason Dublin picked Kill was that it had been granted planning permission before, albeit before the draft EC directives on waste disposal were issued.
“I think there’s no doubt that there was major political pressure exerted. Under previous legislation, the Minister for the Environment would have had to certify the dump himself because the development crossed county boundaries. The day after the application for Kill dump was made, the process was changed by Ministerial directive so that the Minister no longer had to sanction it.”
“Any reasonable person who listened to the evidence presented at the hearing, and then read the twenty-six conditions that resulted would have severe doubts about the fairness of the process,” Lyons adds. “There’s no way you could cover all the issues in the twenty-six points. An Bord Pleanála couldn’t have sanctioned the dump like they did without ignoring the technical detail of the geological situation. It would seem to us that the decision was taken before the hearing even began.”
Paul Mullally, Secretary of An Bord Pleanála, says that it’s not the Board’s general policy to comment on appeals, but he is keen to dismiss out of hand suggestions of political interference.
“There is absolutely no political interference in any appeal that comes before An Bord Pleanála,” he insists. “In fact it’s forbidden by law to attempt to interfere with the appeal process. There’s a fairly rigid statutory scheme laid down for the way we deal with appeals. We act in a quasi-judicial manner. We’re the planning equivalent of the High Court, if you like.”
Such assurances don’t assuage Trevor Lyons, who sees the twenty-six conditions imposed on the dump as entirely inadequate in any case.
“You have the fact that Kildare County Council are supposed to police the dump, and while they’ve done their best for us, they’ve broken a number of EU directives in the past in their own dump,” he points out. “There’s also talk of the dump being raised 120 feet above the ground. That will be disastrous if it is the case – you’ll be able to see it for miles around and there’s absolutely no shelter from the prevailing winds.
“We’re not going to give up though. We can lodge a complaint with the European Commission or we may seek a judicial review in the High Court.”
Trevor Sargent of the Green Party agrees with Lyons on the possibility of attempted political interference with An Bord Pleanála’s decision: “An Bord Pleanála would have been pushed to make this decision by people in authority who are not prepared to live up to their responsibilities. It’s immoral transferring one county’s rubbish into another. It will cause enormous community tension and there will be huge resentment from people in Kildare toward the people of Dublin.”
An Bord Pleanála say they can’t take things like the resentment of the local populace into account: “Our only consideration can be whether the subject of the appeal would be in accordance with the proper planning and development of the area. No other factors can be taken into account. County boundaries would not be of concern to the board,” says the Board Secretary, Paul Mulally.
THE FUTURE
Trevor Sargent says action is urgently needed if we aren’t to end up looking for another ‘Superdump’ site in ten years time. “Sanctioning Kill Dump allows the authorities to postpone taking action in transforming the way we deal with our rubbish,” he says. “The government only talk about recycling, which they see as being a panacea, but also as being too expensive. They should be looking at the whole panorama of waste control and cutting down the amount of waste from the start. A decision to reject Kill as a site would have forced local authorities to think about the options. Local authorities are just using the necessity for national legislation as an excuse at the moment.”
In July, the Department of the Environment launched a drive to cut the amount of waste being tipped on the nation’s dumps by 20% over the next five years. In other words, the amount of waste recycled would be increased from 7.4% at present to 20% at the end of the millennium.
This seems a hopelessly unambitious target, seeing that up to 85% of domestic waste is recyclable. At the launch of the drive, industry and business were told to come up with their own recycling proposals or face mandatory controls.
Industry snapped back, with the Small Firms Association Claiming that industry was being “blackmailed” with unacceptable costs and unreal targets. It remains to be seen whether the government will have the nerve to impose mandatory recycling requirements in the forthcoming waste bill.
If we’re to seriously tackle the waste problem, however, we will have to dramatically cut down the amount of waste we produce at source. This would entail auditing products to make sure they use only the minimum amount of packaging required, phasing out the use of plastic bags in supermarkets, and rather more ‘uncool’ measures such as using peelings and food leftovers to produce compost instead of packing them into bin lines to be hauled off to a quarry in Kildare.
Meanwhile, the fight goes on for the residents of Kill in their efforts to half the development of the dump. Should they succeed in the High Court or in Europe, then as one source in Fingal Council puts it “several million tonnes of shit will hit the fan” for the Dublin local authorities.
It’s as graphic an illustration as you’ll get to explain precisely why tackling the waste problem at source should be the most urgent priority of the Department of the Environment.