Church bells rang out in the north Kildare town of Kilcock. They were not to beckon parishioners to Lenten Mass but to herald an outpouring of joy at the decision of An Bord Pleanala to refuse permission for a £65 million hazardous-waste incinerator in their midst.
"It was the best way of spreading the news," the parish priest, Father P.J. Byrne, later told The Irish Times, as he was preparing to ring them again for RTE.
The relief was palpable in the voices of those who phoned this newspaper. Some 6,000 people had felt so outraged by the Thermal Waste Management proposal that they went to the trouble of formally lodging objections.
The prospect of an incinerator sent shock waves through the area and its surrounding hinterland. Property prices in Kilcock dropped sharply, and new housing developments were suspended. The fight against the incinerator has left them with little change out of £100,000.
For an environmental campaign theirs was unique for the scale of cross-community support it achieved over a wide area of Kildare and Meath, On most of its six days the hearing was attended by up to 600 people.
An Bord Pleanala found the site to be deemed "primarily agricultural" in the Kildare County Plan, notwithstanding a material contravention allowing light industry in the vicinity. The existing road network, notably the junction between the N4/M4 and R148, was incapable of taking the peak-hour traffic the development would entail.
The local authority policy of locating waste-to-energy facilities near landfills or in industrially-zoned areas was "reasonable". Against this background, to locate an incinerator close to housing and a school was considered "inappropriate".
Significantly for other groups preparing to fight incinerators in their areas, the decision was determined by basic issues of zoning, roads, traffic and visual amenity. But the outcome is likely to increase mistaken perceptions that it will boost community campaigns against municipal incinerators.
The reality is likely to prove otherwise, as the Kilcock facility was designed to treat mainly hazardous waste and was to have been a private development. What residents face is a series of local authorities coming together to build thermal treatment plants, which many experts contend are essential to solving waste problems in an integrated way.
On the issue of hazardous waste, the Environmental Protection Agency has identified the need for a specialist incinerator (though part of a strategy including prevention and recycling). Figures will shortly confirm this need as the Irish waste mountain continues to grow.
Therefore some other community somewhere will probably have to contend with such a facility in its area. TWM, which envisaged building an incinerator to match the best in Europe, was in a sense unfortunate as it was first into the fray, and its proposal came before a national strategy on hazardous waste was finalised.
The alliance against incineration, for its part, is to lodge a complaint with the European Commission citing the Government's failure to implement the Seveso 2 Directive. This deals with safety issues arising from the siting, construction and operation of "top tier" facilities, i.e. those which pose serious risks to health and safety.
This directive should have been implemented by February 1999, it claims. Article 12 of the directive deals with land use and requires that member-states introduce controls on the siting of top-tier facilities, which include hazardous-waste incinerators.
It stipulates that "suitable distances" must be maintained between such facilities and residential areas, areas of public use and areas of particular natural sensitivity or interest.
The Kilcock incinerator would have been close to schools and residential areas, the alliance said. Had the Government implemented the directive, as it was required to do, it believes TWM would not have been able to proceed with the application.