The development of a €56 million landfill on a 250-acre site at Bottlehill near Mallow in Co Cork had resulted in the caricature of a council gratuitously destroying the environment of a local community, Cork County Council said yesterday.
Addressing the Bord Pleanála hearing into the proposed landfill, Mr David Holland SC, for the council, said it had also been suggested that the opponents of the project were the only guardians of the environment.
However, he said that the landfill was proposed "for expressly environmental reasons and to address a most urgent environmental concern - that of waste management".
Insisting that the project was not merely environmentally friendly, he maintained that it would make a positive contribution to the Cork environment.
Mr Holland was summarising the council's evidence to the inquiry on the first day of the hearing in Mallow. There had, he said, been two previous hearings into the landfill, which would be shared between Cork city and county councils. The first was when the variation in the County Development Plan was formulated to facilitate the landfill in early 2001. The second was when the case for an environmental protection agency licence was heard last December and January.
Mr Holland said the history of the project negated allegations that the landfill was being "foisted surreptitiously on a surprised populace". He told the Bord Pleanála inspector, Mr Padraic Thornton, that the proposed landfill was part of a waste-management strategy for the Cork region.
The strategy featured extensive efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle waste. It also included a significant and growing infrastructure comprising bring banks and waste separation which would result in the diversion away from landfill of 60 per cent of municipal waste.
In summary, Mr Holland said the proposed Bottlehill landfill was consistent with EU, national, regional and local laws and policies and was a necessary solution to an urgent waste-management problem which the Cork City and County Councils were legally obliged to resolve.
The hearing, which is to continue today, will consider evidence from the Bottlehill Environmental Group and a number of other landowners and concerned citizens opposed to the landfill.
However, the Cork TD Mr Joe Sherlock yesterday told the hearing that the access route which serves the site was so narrow that two cars couldn't pass.
There were houses on one side of the road and a quarry or valley on the other, which meant the road could not be improved.