Work on part of the Dublin Port Tunnel project has been temporarily halted over concerns filling material contains medical waste.
Dublin City Council and contractors agreed to temporarily stop the movement of the material to the tunnel entrance in Fairview after local residents expressed concern about the safety of medical waste contained in it.
Residents of East Wall and Fairview claim they have found "contaminated" material in two stockpiles of soil dug from an old landfill site in the park when work started on the Port Tunnel in 2001/2002.
Dublin City Council spokeswoman
That material, now stored in two stockpiles on a closed site near the Alfie Byrne Road, is now being used to "backfill" any excavation scars left by the tunnel.
The council said no hazardous material is being put back into the public park.
Trucks began moving the waste a short distance from where it was stored back to the tunnel entrance at Fairview Park early last month. Some 350,000 tonnes of material, about half of the total, have been moved to date.
However, local residents claim that when the material was being moved, hospital waste, including syringes, was found in it. They claim Dublin City Council had agreed in 2001/2002 that all such waste from the landfill in Fairview park would be removed and taken abroad for disposal or treatment.
Local representatives, including TDs Tony Gregory and Joe Costello, became involved after the residents held a meeting last week and threatened to begin picketing the site from Monday.
The TDs and residents have held a number of meetings with the city council and the tunnel authorities, including a meeting this morning at which a compromise was reached.
A spokeswoman for Dublin City Council admitted 35 syringes had been found in the material moved since June 7th. However, she said there was no risk from any material in the two stockpiles.
"The material was excavated in 2001/2002 and a quantity of hospital waste was found," she said. A total of 16-and-a-half tonnes was removed under licence from the Environmental Protection Agency and was taken abroad for disposal, the spokeswoman said.
She said the remainder of the material had been surveyed and experts agreed it was suitable for use on the tunnel. The council is operating under a waste permit to move the material back to Fairview Park, she added.
The authority had agreed, as a gesture of good faith, to facilitate the residents by ceasing movement of material from the two stockpiles until next Wednesday so that an independent expert could examine them. Dublin City Council will pay the cost of that examination. A further meeting will take place on Wednesday evening, the spokeswoman said.
"We are facilitating all of their requests to date, but obviously we have complete faith that the material is appropriate [for the tunnel] and that there is not any risk."
Residents' spokesman Joe Mooney
"Syringes themselves coming from landfill that's over 20 years old scientifically have no risk whatsoever."
She said any biological material in the piles would have biodegraded and been "completely nullified" by now. The landfill from which the material came was originally used for domestic waste, although some hospital waste also went into it.
Joe Mooney, chairman of East Wall Residents said local people believed the movement of the material back to Fairview Park had escalated since concerns were raised at a meeting last Thursday.
"We have seen stuff falling off the trucks into the road because they are not secured properly," he claimed.
He said he believed the full amount of contaminated material had not been removed from the piles in 2001/2002 because of the "cost factor involved".
He added that while the residents had originally been told that 10 per cent of the material would be unusable for "backfill", they now believed it was up to 35 per cent.