THE GOVERNMENT is to spend in excess of €36 million to “repatriate” 250,000 tonnes of Irish household and commercial waste illegally dumped in Northern Ireland.
The first consignments of waste will be removed this morning from an illegal dump in Fermanagh to an approved landfill facility in Donegal.
Twenty sites in Northern Ireland are believed to have been used for illegal cross-Border dumping between 2002 and 2004.
Under an agreement between the Government and the Northern Executive, the full cost of disposing of the waste will be met by the State along with 80 per of the cost of removing the waste from Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland authorities will meet the remaining 20 per cent of the removal costs.
Two sites in Fermanagh and Tyrone, containing 14,000 tonnes of waste, will be the first to be excavated. Removal of waste from a dump at Slattinagh, Co Fermanagh, which is just over the Border with Co Leitrim, begins today and is due to take three to four weeks.
Work will then begin on a dump at Trillick, Co Tyrone, about halfway between Enniskillen and Omagh. The removal and remediation of both sites and the disposal of the waste at Ballynacarrick landfill, Co Donegal, will cost the State about €2 million.
The waste will be transported in eight 30-tonne capacity trucks daily from Monday to Friday until the site is cleared.
A further 18 sites have been identified by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency as containing illegally dumped municipal and commercial waste from the Republic. It is estimated that the complete remediation of these sites will take five years and will cost the Government more than €36 million.
Environment ministers from both jurisdictions in 2007 reached agreement on the repatriation of waste illegally dumped in the North to avoid large fines pending from Europe.
The Government was found by the European Commission to have failed to take adequate measures against the export of waste for illegal dumping in unauthorised sites in Northern Ireland. Britain was facing fines for failing to prevent illegal dumping in its jurisdiction.
The deal brokered between Minister for the Environment John Gormley and Stormont’s Environment Minister Sammy Wilson, which sees the Irish State pay for all the costs of disposing of the waste and most of the cost of removing it from the North’s illegal dumps, has been endorsed by the European Commission.
Mr Gormley said the Government had a responsibility under EU waste shipments legislation to ensure that waste originating in the State was properly disposed of. “What we are now doing is facing up to our responsibilities as a State to bring the waste back for proper disposal,” he said.
The illegal dumps originated from a time six to eight years ago when there was considerable illegal waste activity in both jurisdictions and the enforcement regime was not as “robust” as it was now, Mr Gormley said. The agreement reached, he added, was a good example of cross-Border co-operation in relation to environmental protection and he hoped the excavations would provide further evidence in the pursuit of those responsible.
More than 70 prosecutions involving the illegal dumping of waste from the Republic have already been taken by the Northern Ireland authorities. Four landowners have received prison sentences for allowing Irish waste to be dumped on their lands. Fines totalling about £800,000 have also been imposed.
As the cases were prosecuted in Northern Ireland, the proceeds of the fines have remained within that jurisdiction. A source in the Department of the Environment said that it was unlikely the Irish State would see much revenue from fines. It was substantially more difficult to identify the illegal dumpers, who could be prosecuted for dumping without a licence or acting outside the terms of a waste licence.
