A millennium report by the Environment Protection Agency on how we use and abuse our surroundings is a damning indictment of both public and private attitudes towards a fragile and deteriorating eco-system. Successive governments must accept a great deal of blame. They dragged their feet, skimped on spending, bowed to vested interests and, more recently, failed to implement the kind of rigorous remedial programmes now being implemented in other EU countries. Even when useful legislation was passed, the Government devolved responsibility for implementing its terms on local authorities, without providing them with the necessary financial or administrative resources.
To say simply that we are a dirty people and leave it at that - as a number of ministers have done - is inadequate and irresponsible. We are not born with an innate drive to be clean and tidy. Such traits have to be carefully inculcated in the home over a considerable period of time through methods involving gentle encouragement, specific rewards and retributions. Even then, there is no guarantee of success. The situation is more difficult outside the home where the interests and the rights of the community, rather than the family, are in question. Of course, teachers and the education system have a role to play in explaining the reasons for proper behaviour and the inter-linked obligations and rights of citizens. But most people are fully aware they should not litter, pollute air and water or damage the environment. Many do so because of carelessness or financial greed. The millennium report makes for depressing reading. More radical measures are required from the Government, it says, if there is to be any hope of arresting declining water quality, growing air pollution and poor waste management. It advocates the restriction of intensive farming near highly sensitive lakes and rivers; the imposition of a tax on fertiliser sales; phosphorous removal facilities in all waste water treatment plants discharging into inland waters; a coastline management strategy and the restriction of tourist numbers in sensitive landscape areas. It concludes that while the Irish environment is generally good, the trends identified, if left unchecked, could rapidly make this State one of the most polluted in Europe.
The rapidly growing economy and the consequential rise in population has led to increased urbanisation and an unrelenting decline in water quality. The EPA is particularly critical of the failure to break the link between economic growth and waste production. And, in spite of public opposition to new landfill sites and incineration plants, it found little evidence of a determined attempt - at a private or public level - to reduce the amount of waste generated. More imaginative methods of forestry management and greater afforestation, along with an increased use of wind and wave power, would go some small way towards meeting our obligation to reduce the level of greenhouse emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. But, it says, the Government has no choice but to impose "pain" across all sectors of the economy, most likely in the form of an emissions tax.