Local residents hailed as a victory yesterday a decision by a waste management company to withdraw an appeal to An Bord Pleanála on plans to develop the State's largest superdump at Silvermines, Co Tipperary.
An oral hearing will be cancelled after Waste Management Ireland confirmed it would withdraw the application.
Mr Eamon de Stafort, of the Silvermines Environmental Action Group, said people were jubilant at the news following their threeyear campaign.
Senator Kathleen O'Meara (Labour) said the decision was a major victory for the campaign against the dump. "As far as we are concerned, it is a dead duck."
The victory may be short-lived, however. Mr Mark Gilligan, a spokesman for the company, which has operations in Northern Ireland and Britain, said a new application would be made within months.
North Tipperary County Council decided in 1999 to refuse planning permission for the landfill facility at a disused mine. Others against the plan, the Silvermines Environmental Action Group and An Taisce, supported the council's decision. At full capacity, the superdump was to take 450,000 tonnes of waste annually for 22 years.
Mr Gilligan said the appeal had been withdrawn because of developments in waste management strategy in recent years.
The new application would contain tonnage figures from the Midlands Waste Management Strategy, of which North Tipperary is a part.
"The original application was dependent on waste being hauled by rail and it now looks that this may not be achievable," Mr Gilligan said.
There was a growing need for properly managed sites that could take commercial and local authority waste and residues from different treatment processes, he said.
"It has just got worse and worse. We are left with a situation where they are finding illegal sites on a weekly basis."
The Bord Pleanála hearing, which had been deferred four times, was set to go ahead in Killaloe on Monday.