Politicians not practising what they preach, says An Taisce

Ireland will remain the "dirty man of Europe" as long as its political leaders focus on Sellafield while neglecting to deal with serious environmental issues at home, according to An Taisce.

In a bleak end-of-year assessment of the State's environmental performance, it says Ireland may even have the worst record of any country in the world on climate change, with an increase of at least 30 per cent in its greenhouse gas emissions since 1990.

It complains that there was nothing in the Budget for the environment, even though the ESRI, the OECD and the European Commission had all recognised that eco-taxation "is progressive and does not result in reduced employment or competitiveness".

Though the Department of the Environment "seems to be trying hard", the pressures were too great in the absence of goodwill from the economic ministries - particularly the Department of Finance which "seems to feel the environment is not an issue".

An Taisce, which sees itself as Ireland's leading environmental organisation, noted the Government faces 27 legal actions by the European Commission for infringements of EU directives on a range of environmental issues.

According to the trust, there may be 300 illegal dumps across the State, including possibly as many as 100 in Co Wicklow alone. And of the 327,000 tonnes of hazardous waste generated annually, 98,000 tonnes - much of it in the farming sector - is unreported.

"We continue to build over 35 per cent of our housing in the countryside even though nearly all professional sociologists, and all professional economists and environmentalists, consider this a time-bomb" in terms of environmental sustainability.

"Only 60 per cent of group water schemes are within acceptable safety levels," the report complains.

Meanwhile, local authorities in the Greater Dublin area continued to allow the capital to sprawl into its hinterland in breach of statutory planning guidelines.

"There is next to no enforcement by local authorities of the planning laws", An Taisce says. Dublin Corporation, for example, was "failing to deal with hundreds of properties which are fire traps", many of them occupied by Eastern Health Board tenants.

It claims that some 50 per cent of recommendations from D·chas to protect the architectural heritage have been ignored by local authorities, while the Budget allocation for grants in this area was "chopped" by 44 per cent to £2.65 million (€3.4 million).

The report also notes a 1999 Heritage Council estimate that 10 per cent of the State's archaeological monuments had been destroyed in the last decade alone.

Ireland was also "last in the race" to protect Europe's natural habitats, with a recent World Wildlife Fund "snapshot" report on progress among EU member-states in implementing the Habitate Directive awarding it only eight points out of a potential 30.

Under the National Development Plan, £6.3 billion (€8 billion) would be spent on roads "without a single penny on rail outside Dublin" - other than the minimum required to ensure rail safety.

Challenging the National Roads Authority's programme, An Taisce says: "Research shows that the more roads you build the more people buy cars to fill them up. And in the first half of 2001, we bought more than twice the number of cars we bought in the whole of 1993.

"It's easy for Government and Opposition to focus on Sellafield, about which they can probably unfortunately do nothing.

"As Ireland's largest environmental campaigner, An Taisce says let's start the fight for a good environment at home," the assessment concludes.