Last week a planning hearing into the proposed development of a national hazardous waste incinerator at Ringaskiddy finished in Cork. Environment Editor, Frank McDonald, reports on the issues surrounding the controversial plan
On Friday, September 26th, the Minister for Education, Mr Demspey, laid the foundation stone for a new €51 million National Maritime College facing the naval base at Haulbowline at Ringaskiddy in Cork Harbour.
The college, due to open next year with 750 full-time students, was hailed by the Minister as a "unique facility" to serve the training needs of Irish mariners well into the future.
Five days earlier, in the Neptune Stadium basketball arena in Cork city, An Bord Pleanála opened a public hearing into the controversial €95 million plan by Indaver Ireland to build a national hazardous waste incinerator at Ringaskiddy.
Indaver's 31-acre site is just across the road from the National Maritime College, where construction work is well under way. The storage compound for drums of toxic waste would be located just 25 metres from its entrance.
Mr John Ahern, Indaver's Co Limerick-born managing director, says the college had not objected to, or appealed against, the company's plans.
"Nobody can guarantee that something won't go wrong, not even ourselves", Mr Ahern frankly conceded last week after being cross-examined at the hearing. "But we've built every safety precaution into the design of the plant, including its own fire-fighting facilities."
But many people in Cork are not so sanguine about the safety of incinerating toxic waste.
When Ms Linda Fitzpatrick, a mother of four young children, first heard the news that Ringaskiddy was being targeted as the site for a national hazardous waste incinerator, she says she could have cried.
It was in April 2001, the day of her daughter Zoe's fourth birthday. Ms Fitzpatrick was particularly concerned about emissions from the plant as Zoe has asthma and the family's bungalow in the Hilltown countryside is about two miles from Indaver's chosen site, as the crow flies.
Residents' associations around the harbour banded together to form CHASE (Cork Harbour Alliance for a Safe Environment) in September 2001, with the aim of fighting off Indaver. Ms Fitzpatrick became its spokeswoman and is now nursing a three-week-old baby son, Jack.
CHASE managed to raise the money to run its campaign and pay for its own experts to attend An Bord Pleanála's hearing by running coffee mornings and other fund-raising events. But it has also received discreet support from local business people, one of whom paid Ms Fitzpatrick's €800 phone bill.
"We've kept this going by taking time out of our lives,", said CHASE's chairwoman, Ms Mary O'Leary, who also has four children, three of them teenagers.
British actor Jeremy Irons, who has a castle near Skibbereen, and celebrity chefs Darina and Myrtle Allen, of Ballymaloe House in east Cork, also appeared at the hearing and pleaded for the Indaver plan to be refused permission, arguing that it represented the wrong way for Ireland to go.
A total of 23,000 people signed form letters objecting to the plan after it was lodged with Cork County Council.
"Nobody wants a toxic incinerator" says a hand-scrawled sign at Rushbrooke station on the Cobh line. "No incinerator - enough is enough" say the bumper stickers.
The reference is to Cork Harbour. People living around it feel they have been dumped on over the years. First it was Irish Steel with its plant in Cobh, then the Whitegate oil refinery, the IFI fertiliser factory and a rake of pharmaceutical industries.
The tall chimney of Aghada power station can be seen from miles around. Pylons carrying electricity lines march across the landscape. A sign at Gobby strand, near the Indaver site, warns fishermen that there are live 110 kv lines overhead.
In and around Ringaskiddy, huge box-like structures house the activities of such big names in the pharmaceutical sector as Pfizer, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline. All of them generate hazardous waste requiring treatment or disposal - usually by exporting it to other European countries.CHASE points out that most of these companies have been reducing the volume of waste in recent years, spurred on by increasing costs and cleaner production conditions set by the Environmental Protection Agency in its IPC (Integrated Pollution Control) licences.
But Indaver counters this by noting that Ireland is still exporting 24,000 tonnes of hazardous waste a year to Britain, Germany, Denmark or Finland and that 60 per cent of it arises in the Cork area. Thus, Indaver's argument for its plant is based squarely on the proximity principle.
Mr Ahern says that while the objectors insist that we shouldn't have a hazardous waste incinerator in Ireland, "no-one has said we shouldn't export this waste for incineration elsewhere". To him, it calls to mind the other problems we've exported, such as abortion.
"We should be big boys and deal with our own problems here at home," he says. "We should be strong enough to deal with our own waste."
Nonetheless, Cork County Council refused planning permission to Indaver last June after most of its members voted against contravening the county development plan, which makes no provision for a national hazardous waste incinerator at Ringaskiddy. The proposed plant also represents the first major challenge to the 2001 Cork Area Strategic Plan, known as CASP, which looks towards a 2020 horizon and envisages the lower harbour being conserved and developed for tourism, amenities and recreation.
Ms O'Leary notes proudly that Cobh attracted 33 cruise liners this year and says 41 are expected in 2004. The most recent visitor was an American warship, the USS Roosevelt, which docked amid tight security below the town's serried terraces of colourfully-painted houses.
With the former Irish Steel plant now scheduled to be dismantled and its ugly slag heap removed from the water off Haulbowline, and the former IFI fertiliser plant also likely to go, Cork Harbour can look forward to a de-industrialised future - apart from the pharmaceutical sector.
A fluidised-bed incinerator, with a stack that would be visible from Cobh looming up over the clocktower of the naval base, would clearly be incompatible with this vision - however much its wavy roof, designed by Cork architects Billy Wilson and Associates, reflects the contours of the hill behind.
A Martello tower stands on the ridge, and CHASE fears it could be undermined by excavations on the site, which envelops the primitive-looking Hammond Lane scrap metal works. But Mr Ahern says that though Indaver would be "digging into the hill to push back the plant", these fears are groundless.
Such matters are, of course, subsidiary to public health and safety concerns. But issues relating to environmental pollution could not be raised at the hearing, as Indaver's application was lodged before the effective date of the 2000 Planning Act, which would have allowed them to be ventilated.
However, the public safety issues are substantial, which is why the Health and Safety Authority was recalled for further examination to the Bord Pleanála hearing last week.
There are concerns, in particular, about how people in the area - Cobh itself has a population of 14,000 - would be evacuated if there was an accident.
The recent fire at the former Sunbeam plant in Cork, which sent black smoke billowing over the Neptune Stadium, was seen as proof that accidents do happen.
"The factory had an asbestos roof, yet the EPA said it was completely safe. How could they say that so quickly?" asked Ms O'Leary.
Mr Philip Jones, the planning inspector who chaired the hearing, will now write a report for An Bord Pleanála. But even if he recommends a refusal, Indaver is banking on the appeals board granting permission, just as it did for the company's municipal waste incinerator at Carranstown, Co Meath.