Article 45 of the Constitution demands as a principle of social policy that "there may be established on the land in economic security as many families as in the circumstances shall be practicable".
Reading it now, you realise it was formulated to mean as much or as little as was needed "in the circumstances", but then it represented a commitment to a society that discriminated between good and otherwise. Today, as though determined to disperse any residual hankering after such ideals, efforts are under way to turn some of Ireland's most arable land into landfill dumps for the detritus of our disposable society.
The issue, which will loom large in the coming election campaign, is alive and kicking in many communities, and nowhere more so that in the north Dublin communities of Loughbarn, Tooman, Ballyboughill, Balbriggan, Skerries, Loughshinny and The Naul, a section of countryside stretching from the edge of the capital to the borders of Co Meath, where generations of farming life are threatened by a proposed superdump for the capital's waste.
The superdump is part of the waste management plan for the region, agreed by Dublin's four local authorities. In north Dublin the initial list of 10 sites has been shortened to five, which along with three sites in south Dublin and Dun Laoghaire will be whittled down to one or more superdumps to serve all Co Dublin. According to P.J. Rudden of M.C. O'Sullivan, the engineers charged with identifying and assessing the sites, the most likely outcome is one dump in the north county and one in the south.
All the north Dublin sites are on prime farmland. A dump in any of them would have enormous consequences for the farming communities. Many families stand to lose the farms they have worked for generations to compulsory purchase orders.
The area is comparable to the Golden Vale, combining high fertility and serious agriculture with enormous scenic resources. The views from most of the proposed sites are stunning, embracing Dublin city, the bay and the Wicklow hills.
Parts of some sites have high amenity status - it would be difficult to get permission to build a house. It seems the bad planning which has resulted in the grotesque expansion of Dublin and the emasculation of many areas of the countryside are now set to destroy one of the last agricultural communities in Dublin.
"The city is creeping up on us," says Andrew Cassin, a farmer from Salmon, Balbriggan, whose family has farmed there for four generations. He stands to lose nearly all his 250-acre farm if the Loughbarn site is chosen. There are 61 houses in the area designated for this site, meaning that, if placed there, the dump would directly affect over 400 people. Most of them would see their homes demolished, land compulsorily purchased and livelihoods taken away.
Mary Thorne, from Tooman, has two sons with an interest in continuing the family farming tradition. She has already lost half her farm to the Dublin-Belfast motorway, and stands to lose the rest if Tooman draws the short straw.
Each of the sites comprises 600 to 1,200 acres. One of the five, Loughmain/
Brownstown, combines three sites from the original list, amounting to 2,000 acres. However, according to P.J. Rudden the final site will cover only "a fraction" of the designated area, about 100 acres, with about one-third of the space designated for "buffer zones", where forestry - probably fast-growing conifers - will be planted.
There is a feeling in the communities that the official strategy is to make the north county the scapegoat for Dublin's waste problem. Eddie White, who has been co-ordinating opposition to the Loughmain/
Brownstown site, says the authorities want to "impose a waste-disposal facility rather than implement a proper waste-management plan".
The action groups representing the communities in the five threatened areas point out that the Waste Management Strategy for the Dublin Region, ratified by the four local authorities, places landfill last in the order of options for waste disposal. And yet, says Dermot Sheridan of the Tooman action group, this is the only strategy being pursued.
"They shouldn't even look for a dump anywhere, until they have done something about implementing the rest of the plan they have agreed: recycling, re-using, composting, and so on. The plan talks about a pyramid of options, the last of which is landfill. And the only option being seriously considered at the moment is landfill. So they're starting at the wrong end of the pyramid."
The waste generated by Dublin city is roughly nine times that generated by the rest of the county. "There is a general feeling throughout Fingal," says Dermot Sheridan, "that we do not want Dublin's waste. We have to deal with our own, and that's fair enough. We have to educate people not to generate so much waste. But Dublin city so far has done absolutely nothing to minimise its waste. There's no education, there's no incentive to minimise what is dumped.
"Walk down O'Connell Street at seven o'clock in the morning and see the piles of rubbish left there to be disposed of. And they're looking now to continue to dump, while this still goes on. It's just not acceptable for them to take waste out of Dublin and put it here."
Nobody is prepared to look at the bigger picture, they say, or relate the waste disposal issue to environmental or community concerns.
For example, close to the proposed site at Tooman there is an underground lake, out of which, even in high summer, crystalclear water gushes via the recent boreholes. This natural reservoir could provide enough water to supply the whole of north Co Dublin, but a nearby superdump would almost certainly result in its contamination. Although water quality, like waste-management, comes within the remit of the Department of the Environment, nobody is making the necessary connections.
Dermot Sheridan asks: "Are we prepared to risk groundwater contamination that could last for thousands of years for the sake of an expedient solution to Dublin's waste problem?" P.J. Rudden says factors like groundwater will be taken into consideration when final evaluations are made.
Another concern is the viability of farms not commandeered for the dump but continuing to function near it. With the emphasis now on traceability, the proximity of a dump would effectively wipe out the reputation of farming in the area. As Martin Moore, a farmer from Tooman, points out, the fact that his stock came from the dump hinterland would make them unsaleable.
P.J. Rudden says all these factors will be considered in the further screening-out process after field-studies on the sites, which will begin soon. The final site will be chosen by the end of the year, he says, with a view to minimising the impact on dwellings and farms.
It is five years since the dump was first mooted. The Tooman group went on red alert in 1998, when the word went out that Tooman was the preferred site. The communities believe that a war of attrition is part of a strategy to wear down resistance, and that a multiplicity of sites was mooted to put the various threatened communities in competition, thus reducing the chance of concerted cross-community action. If this was the strategy, it has failed.
The political response has been mostly in the style of Pontius Pilate. Politicians hide behind local authorities, which hide behind the Waste Management Plan, which was introduced by politicians so they could hide behind it. The authorities have created a non-system geared to protecting themselves from public anger about what is regarded as a lose-lose issue.
But the communities insist there are alternatives to landfill. Jim Casey of the Loughbarn action group says the local authorities have done nothing about the commitment to achieve 60 per cent recycling capacity as part of their own waste management strategy.
Naul Community Council has advanced proposals, with emphasis on limiting superfluous packaging, composting and recycling. The groups point out that any co-ordinated recycling policy will require massive public education, tax incentives and penalties, the creation of markets for recycled products and an elaborate infrastructure requiring a totally different culture of waste management.
P.J. Rudden agrees with this and says this is precisely what is intended. The new dump will not become operational until the waste management plan has been implemented in its entirety, including recycling and thermal-treatment, i.e. waste incineration.
"Landfill is on the way out," he says, while accepting that people have good reasons for being sceptical about this. He acknowledges that the recycling record has been less than auspicious, from 8 per cent to 9 per cent in the past five years.
He points out that about half of the waste problem is builders' waste, but this has already been dealt with at Balleally dump, also in north Dublin, with a programme of recycling construction waste resulting in the reduction of total waste by half in the past five years.
He maintains that the Environmental Protection Agency, which has responsibility for setting targets for recycling and other initiatives, is determined to change Ireland's waste-disposal culture.
Local people are not so sure, nor are they impressed by promises that the dump would be "well managed", or that it would close within an agreed time frame.
P.J. Rudden says the new dump would last about 10 years, but the communities point to the experiences of Balleally, where the dump has been subject to extension after extension. The size of the new sites mooted, they insist, suggests a plan to create a permanent superdump with virtually limitless expansion capability.
On the contrary, says P.J. Rudden. Balleally's lifespan has been extended precisely to enable the new system to be introduced: the new dump will not resemble previous landfills.
The community groups, however, point out that dumping is now big business, and the £100 million superdump will represent a substantial money-spinner for Fingal County Council, which is already making millions of pounds yearly from waste disposal with a relatively antiquated dumping infrastructure. There could be up to 400 dump trucks a day on the road when the new dump is operational.
The problem, say the action groups, is short-term notions of cost-effectiveness: landfill combined with domestic refuse charges is more operator-friendly than a system involving sorting, recycling, composting and re-using. This logic, as ever, discounts the long-term cost of a landfill-led policy.
Last year agriculture amounted to just 5 per cent of GDP. Before long, waste disposal may be a more significant industry. Welcome to the Celtic Tip.
