The European Union's highest court has found Ireland guilty of "general and persistent" flouting of EU rules on waste disposal by ignoring illegal dumping throughout the State.
The European Court of Justice ruled that the Government had failed in its obligation, dating back to 1977, to ensure that all municipal landfills held a permit for waste disposal.
The court found that applications for such permits took an average of 26 months to be processed and sometimes took as long as four years.
"The Irish authorities have tolerated unauthorised activities in numerous places in Ireland, often over long periods, failing to require that those activities be brought to an end," the court said. "Such a failure to fulfil obligations is general and persistent in nature."
Yesterday's decision follows a succession of legal moves by the European Commission against Ireland for flouting EU environmental laws.
The court ordered Ireland to pay the costs of the action, which the commission took following a number of complaints from Irish citizens.
The commission welcomed the court decision and warned that it would watch closely to ensure that the Government complied with the ruling.
A spokeswoman for the environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said that the Government would be given three months to outline how it will comply with the ruling.
"If we see that not enough is being done, we will return to the court and a fine could be imposed," she said. "We hope, of course, that it won't get that far.
In 2001 the court imposed a fine of €20,000 a day on Greece in a similar case concerning a single landfill site on Crete. By the time Greece complied with the ruling 2½ years later, it had paid more than €18 million in fines.
The Irish case concerns a number of sites and any fine imposed by the court would almost certainly be higher than that faced by Greece.
The court found that Ireland breached eight articles of an EU directive on waste which was first approved in 1975 and amended in 1991. It also ruled that Ireland flouted article 10 of the EC treaty by failing to respond properly to a commission request for information on a waste-disposal site at Fermoy, Co Cork.
The waste directive obliges EU member states to "take the necessary measures to ensure that waste is recovered or disposed of without endangering human health and without using processes or methods which could harm the environment". Member states must also "take the necessary measures to prohibit the abandonment, dumping or uncontrolled disposal of waste".
All waste-disposal operations must be covered by a permit outlining the types and quantities of waste, the technical requirements, the security precautions to be taken, the disposal site and the treatment method.
The court found that Ireland's failure to introduce and enforce an effective permit system meant that other elements of the waste directive could not be enforced.
"The disposal or recovery of waste without risk to public health and the environment, the establishment of an integrated and adequate network for waste disposal and the inspection of waste holders and of operators dealing with waste are possible only within the framework of an effective permit system," it said.