EU: Dunmore East, the Co Waterford fishing village where European Union environment ministers are lunching today, is the subject of a complaint to the European Commission over the discharge of raw sewage into its cove.
The complaint is one of five made by a Co Waterford artist, Ms Roisín O'Shea, and her partner, Mr Don Sutherland, mainly relating to breaches of EU directives on water pollution in Ardmore, Stradbally and Dunmore East.
"We went over to Brussels in March because we had been fighting this locally for three years, trying to get the Minister for the Environment to get his finger out and have it sorted", Mr Sutherland said. The Minister, Mr Cullen, is a TD for Waterford.
"There's been a huge housing boom here, so the situation is critical", Mr Sutherland said. Of the 11 samples he took in Stradbally, seven were "off the scale" in terms of EU limits, and he contracted an E.coli infection himself.
The European Court is to rule shortly on another case taken by the EU Commission over an extension of the notorious Tramore dump into a wetland area of international importance, without proper authorisation.
A Commission source said yesterday that there had been "a particular concentration of complaints in relation to Waterford" in recent years, mostly concerning damage to wetlands by both legal and illegal waste-disposal activities.
These include the "inappropriately sited" Waterford city landfill site at Kilbarry, where the Commission is not satisfied that groundwater will be protected from pollution by the licence it received from the Environmental Protection Agency.
"We've also brought up the damage done to some of the quite special fens in Waterford by the illegal dumping of construction and demolition waste and the lack of evidence that any appropriate action is being taken on it," Mr Sutherland said.
The Commission source said the impact of slurry-spreading by a piggery in Stradbally had also been "quite telling" in the Commission's successful prosecution of Ireland for its failure to implement the EU Nitrates Directive.
The fact that his home county is in the dock over pollution is bound to prove embarassing to Mr Cullen as he hosts the first full gathering of environment ministers since EU enlargement for an informal meeting in Waterford.
Today's meeting, at Waterford Institute of Technology, will be attended by the EU Environment Commissioner, Ms Margot Wallstrom, who is also expected to visit the recently-discovered Viking archaeological site at Woodtown.
The main focus of the ministerial meeting will be on proposals to develop EU policy on the trans-boundary movement of waste, as well as on preventing and recycling waste and the development of a "clean economics" agenda.
The South East Social Forum is holding what it calls an alternative environmental summit, to coincide with the official event. It will include a demonstration this afternoon at The Glen.