County councillors in Louth voted yesterday to rescind a decision which rejected a draft waste management plan for the northeast.
The resolution to rescind the earlier motion was passed by 16 votes to nine.
The council chairman, Mr Nicky McCabe (Fianna Fail), declared the resolution carried and claimed this vote gave the two-thirds majority needed under the council's standing orders to overturn the previous decision.
The county secretary, Mr Joe Boland, agreed and explained that under standing orders fractions were not taken into account. The county council will now reconsider the draft waste plan at a meeting on February 19th, according to Mr Boland.
A number of councillors have claimed that the vote of nine against represents more than one-third of those present at the meeting and as such the resolution to rescind was lost.
A Sinn Fein councillor, Mr Arthur Morgan, has confirmed that he has begun legal action to have the chairman's ruling overturned.
The decision to rescind will enable the council to reconsider the waste plan, which has been adopted by county councils in Meath, Monaghan and Cavan and includes incineration as an option for dealing with 39 per cent of the four million tonnes of waste produced each year in the region.
The Louth county manager, Mr John Quinlivan, told councillors the closure of the Drogheda landfill site, the impending closure of Dundalk landfill facility in 18 months and a 20,000-tonne intake limit on the Whiteriver landfill site near Dunleer meant the gravity of the county's waste problem could no longer be ignored.
"The position is no longer serious, it is fast becoming desperate," he said.