Ireland's poor record cited on implementing environment laws

Ireland has one of the worst records among member-states for implementing EU directives on the environment, the EU Commission stated yesterday.

A European Commission report, released yesterday, criticised Ireland, France, Greece, Italy and Spain over their poor implementation of EU environment laws, particularly on water and waste.

The commission report found that at the end of last year there were 88 instances in which EU environmental directives had not been made into national laws on time.

It said that in 118 other cases the directives were incorrectly transposed.

The report found that Ireland, France, Greece, Italy and Spain had the worst records. The report said that directives in relation to water, waste, nature protection and environmental impact assessment had been the most neglected by member-states.

In a statement last night the EU Environment Commissioner, Ms Margot Wallstrom, said that the implementation of EU environment law was " bad".

"I hope the survey's findings will give member-states reason to improve their record and provide their citizens with the level of environmental protection that they demand," she said.

However the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, defended the Government's record in the implementation of EU directives.

"Ireland has a 98 per cent transposition rate with EU law. This puts Ireland as fourth best out of the 25 members. Yes, there are matters outstanding and the Government is pro-actively working with the commission to deal with these," he said.

The Minister said that just as with all members-states, challenges would arise occasionally.

"An illustration of this is the difficulties Europe faces in dealing with illegal movements of waste. But deal with it we must and deal with it we will," Mr Cullen said.

Green Party leader Mr Trevor Sargent said last night that a change of attitude was needed on the part of the Government as much as a change in policy.

He said the current attitude seemed to be that environmental laws were a nuisance rather than an opportunity.

A Commission spokeswoman said that one reason for the poor record on the implementation of EU environmental rules was that such directives were often complicated.