Wicklow County Council is investigating nearly 100 illegal dump sites in "the Garden of Ireland". Some may be quite small, perhaps only a few black plastic bags thrown in a ditch, but others are very large, containing thousands of tonnes of waste.
For years the county council turned a blind eye to unauthorised sand-and-gravel quarries, even to the extent of buying material from them. Now it has found that a number of these quarries have been turned into dumps by unscrupulous landowners and waste contractors.
Preliminary investigations of the most recent dumps to be discovered, at Coolnamadra and Whitestown, near the Glen of Imaal, have confirmed the presence of hospital waste at both locations - including human blood. This has already contaminated the water table.
The Wicklow county manager, Mr Eddie Sheehy, told a special meeting of the county council last week that local groundwater and a nearby tributary of the River Slaney had been polluted by leachate from hospital waste. But there is, as yet, no threat to Poulaphouca reservoir.
The Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, expressed his horror at the dumping of hospital waste in Co Wicklow, particularly if it poses a risk to public health. "This activity is clearly illegal and grossly irresponsible." It should incur "the full rigours of the law", he said.
Underlying the serious view he takes of this scandal, his Department is requesting the Criminal Assets Bureau, with its impressive record in recovering profits from organised crime, to investigate "systematic profiteering" from illegal waste disposal, starting in Co Wicklow.
Where there's muck, there's brass, as the old saying goes. And brass necks, too. Large sums of money, running into millions of pounds, are at stake as cowboy contractors pile waste into convenient holes in the ground to avoid paying hefty charges at official landfill sites.
Based on the current charge of £80 (€101.58) a tonne at Fingal County Council's Baleally landfill, a truck carrying 25 tonnes of commercial and industrial waste would have to pay £2,000 to deposit its load. But it could cost as little as £100 a truck to dump at a disused quarry.
The council estimates that the Coolnamadra site, which is owned by Clifford Fenton, contains 8,000 tonnes of general waste. However, it has been impossible to quantify the amount of hospital waste dumped there because it is mixed in with everything else.
"The whole lot will have to be removed. There is no question of leaving it there," said Mr Michael Nicholson, the council's director of environmental services. Dublin Waste Ltd has offered to do just that, in a statement admitting its role in dumping waste at Coolnamadra.
The other site at Whitestown, owned by Mr John Reilly, is a lot bigger. According to Mr Nicholson, it may contain "hundreds of thousands of tonnes" of waste - much of it dumped there late at night or in the early hours of the morning in a highly organised moonlighting operation.
As far back as March 1998, after a local resident complained, council officials spoke to Mr Reilly. They told him dumping must cease at the site and the waste already deposited there removed. "He assured us it would and we heard no more about it," one resident said.
Despite subsequent claims that an enforcement notice had been issued under Section 55 of the 1996 Waste Management Act, no legal action was taken. And so dumping continued at the Whitestown site under cover of darkness while quarrying continued during the day.
It was only last month, three-and-a-half years after the initial complaint, that council officials carried out another inspection. They found that the site had ceased operating as a sand-and-gravel quarry and that all of the machinery in use there was owned by Dublin-based A1 Waste.
"There were no piles of rubbish or evidence of anything on the surface," one official said. The waste had been so carefully covered by layer upon layer of topsoil they had to "dig down fairly deep before we saw any rubbish". It, too, is peppered with hospital waste.
One of those who drove truckloads of waste to the site was Mr John Mullins jnr, a son of the county council's overseer for the area, whose own home is not far from the illegal dump. He (the son) was seen on site with Mr Reilly as builders' rubble was being dumped.
Following discovery of the scale of illegal dumping at Whitestown, his father, Mr John Mullins snr, was interviewed by council officials. The acting county secretary, Mr Liam Fitzpatrick, said he and all of the staff in the area had "co-operated very fully" in the council's inquiries.
A1 Waste had approached Mr Reilly in 1998 about using his quarry as a dump for construction and demolition waste. He agreed and got paid on a regular basis, though there was no weighbridge on the site nor any other auditing procedure to monitor the tonnages involved.
Last June, Fingal County Council halved its intake of commercial and industrial waste at Baleally, basing the new, reduced allocations to waste disposal contractors on the tonnages they had dumped there last year. As a result, some contractors found themselves in trouble.
A1 Waste and Dublin Waste had brought only small quantities to Baleally last year and, therefore, lost out. Both companies had lucrative contracts to dispose of commercial and industrial waste, as well as builders' rubble, but now they had "nowhere to go", one source said.
The only options open to them were either a licensed landfill operated by KTK Ltd near Kilcullen, Co Kildare, or "holes in the ground" in Co Wicklow, such as Whitestown, which had neither planning permission nor a waste disposal licence from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Swalcliffe Ltd, trading as Dublin Waste, has been prosecuted twice by the EPA for breaching the terms of licences granted under the 1996 Waste Management Act for the operation of waste transfer facilities at Greenhills Road, Walkinstown, and at Sheriff Street in the city centre.
Last February it pleaded guilty to three charges of failing to keep proper records at the Greenhills site and was fined £500 on each count. Then, in November, the company was convicted of a further seven charges and fined a total of £7,500, plus costs amounting to £8,456.
The charges, which related to its site at 116 Sherriff Street, covered the disposal of waste at unauthorised facilities, failure to keep records, accepting waste other than the types permitted, accepting waste outside the times permitted and exceeding dust emission limits.
Because it was a second prosecution, the EPA also brought charges against the two directors of the company, Mr Louis Moriarty and Ms Eileen Moriarty, for allowing the disposal of waste at unauthorised facilities. They were each found guilty and fined a total of £1,200.
Under the name Dean Waste, A1 was licensed by the EPA last December to operate a waste transfer station at Greenhills Road, Walkinstown, dealing mainly with commercial and industrial waste. It has no licence to dump such waste, or any other waste, in Co Wicklow.
The directors of Dean Waste Company Ltd, according to an annual return filed last October, are Mr Anthony Dean, Ms Una Dean, Mr Roger McGreal and Dr Eric Colhoun. The company made a pre-tax profit of £1.97 million on a turnover of £4.97 million in the year ended July 31st, 2000.
Dean/A1 has never been prosecuted by the EPA, but is now likely to face legal action from Wicklow County Council over its involvement in Whitestown. Attempts this week to contact managing director Mr Dean to question him proved unsuccessful.
Since 1998, the EPA has been the "competent authority" for licensing major waste disposal and recovery activities, including landfill sites operated by local authorities. Its personnel are also available to give advice on waste management to county councils and private firms.
But a spokeswoman for the EPA said the local authorities were primarily responsible for environmental protection in their own functional areas and were given special powers to supervise and enforce compliance with the provisions of the Waste Management Act.
Wicklow County Council's own licensed landfill at Ballymurtagh, in the Vale of Avoca, was opened in 1989 with an anticipated lifespan of 27 years. Two years ago, however, councillors were told it had reached capacity because of the large volumes of waste dumped there.
Unusually, this landfill site had no weighbridge to monitor and control the scale of dumping by private contractors. Now, the former acting county manager, Mr Hubert Fitzpatrick, is a consultant to Celtic Waste Ltd on its current plans for a 400-acre replacement landfill at Ballinagran.
In an immediate response to the revelations about illegal dumping in Co Wicklow, new regulations were introduced on December 1st by the Minister for the Environment, extending the licensing requirement from contractors to all carriers of waste, to control its movement.
Under the Waste Management (Collection Permit) Regulations, 2001, commercial waste collectors must obtain a waste collection permit. Local authorities can require permit holders to ensure that the waste they are transporting is transferred only to an authorised facility.
A local authority would be entitled to refuse to grant a collection permit, or to revoke one that had already been granted, in the event that an applicant or "permittee" is found guilty of any one of a number of specified waste offences, including unauthorised dumping.
Wicklow County Council has also woken up. The county manager, Mr Sheehy, who took over last January after initiating an investigation into "double-jobbing" by council officials in Roscommon, has made it clear he wants to stamp out illegal dumping in the county.
The council has set up a task force to "go through each site one by one", according to its director of environmental services, who said the list "now runs to 100" sites, both large and small. It is clear that the cost of cleaning up the largest sites could run into several million pounds.
Referring specifically to the Coolnamadra and Whitestown sites, Mr Sheehy said he was determined the full cost of this clean-up operation would be borne by the landowners, waste contractors, hospitals and anybody else culpable for what has happened.
Last Tuesday, at Naas District Court, one of Wicklow County Council's waste contractors, Andrew Phibbs, was fined £4,500 and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment after pleading guilty in September to three offences under the Waste Management Act.
Wicklow's acting county secretary, Mr Fitzpatrick, welcomed the outcome, describing it as "a vindication of a lot of detailed work and determination", and said it could also be seen as a symbol of the council's intention to crack down on illegal dumping in the county.
Phibbs, who had collected domestic refuse on the council's behalf in west Wicklow, was found to have stacked waste six feet high outside a house he owns at Hempstown, north of Blessington, and had failed to comply with a Section 55 order to cease this dumping.
The Whitestown and Coolnamadra cases are regarded as much more serious, and it is now likely the council will prosecute those responsible by way of indictment in the Circuit Court, where the maximum penalty is a fine of £10 million and/or 10 years in prison.
Where a local authority uncovers evidence of systematic, large-scale dumping, the Minister has said it should be referred to the DPP to be prosecuted as a serious offence. To that end, his Department has consulted the DPP's office to prepare guidelines for local authorities.
Mr Dempsey also warned that landowners who colluded in illegal dumping were liable to prosecution, as well as those who carried it out.
They could also be required to remove and properly dispose of the wastes concerned and undertake necessary environmental remediation.
The Minister is patently concerned that, unless offenders are brought to book, the imposition early next year of a landfill levy - expected to be £10 a tonne - could lead to a further proliferation of illegal dumping by unscrupulous operators seeking to evade paying it.
As a result, Mr Dempsey has pledged that a "very significant proportion" of the revenue generated by the new levy will be made available to local authorities to fund enforcement initiatives to control fly-tipping and unauthorised waste activities.
