Garda reinforcements will not always be necessary but hearings similar to that staged in Limerick to determine the terms of a pollution control licence for the giant Aughinish Alumina plant will soon be a frequent occurrence, writes Kevin O'Sullivan, Environmental and Food Science Correspondent
By KEVIN O'SULLIVAN
IRELAND has entered the era of integrated pollution control licensing. Any plant producing significant waste - whether released in to air, discharged into water or disposed of on land will have to account for its activities like never before. With the Environmental Protection Agency as overseer, it offers public and environmental interests greater opportunity to articulate concerns and to have them responded to by individual companies.
Integrated pollution control - IPC - is such a radical departure in environmental control and a mammoth task that it has to be phased in. Some 120 licences have been issued within the past 2 1/2 years. By the end of 1998, up to 800 licences will be in place.
Aughinish Alumina is being required to reduce sulphur dioxide (gas pollutant) emissions by two thirds. The requirement, it claimed, was stricter that EU standards and environmentally unjustified. Objectors claimed the terms were not strict enough.
Higher environment standards are a consequence of greater public concern. Standards are more easily monitored by more sensitive technologies as the developed world hums a "sustainable development" mantra, but the EPA admits companies are being given time to come up to standard.
New accountability is in place, notwithstanding strong criticism of the EPA at the hearing by opponents of the licence terms. Protests by farmers and residents from Askeaton the plant is in the same area were angry at the failure to establish the cause of more than 170 cattle fatalities in the vicinity since 1988. The hearing, which concluded on Friday, has nonetheless focused on the EPA's arduous role in trying to balance industrial requirements with environmental concerns.
Its latest report on the Askeaton farm deaths, which cleared Aughinish Alumina of any link days before the hearing, meant it would not only be about its routine discharges of sulphur dioxide and associated gases - the EPA itself had become the focus.
Aughinish Alumina was anxious to spell out its 40 objections in language making it clear that should the draft licence apply, plant closure loomed. It secured the services of a US authority of respiratory medicine and an air quality expert from Britain to evaluate monitoring results to date, and its case also had a strong financial element.
While the EPA has pointed to its independent approach to IPC, many companies have set up under terms drawn up largely by the IDA. Aughinish Alumina adverted to one such agreement dating from 1974, which it believes is being contravened by the IPC terms. This, according to Cork Environmental Alliance (the only objector to take part in the hearing after local farmers withdrew in protest at the EPA's role), represents a fundamental questioning of the new system and is likely to surface again where contentious licences are being introduced.
In Aughinish Alumina's case, the plant's financial controller boiled the conditions down to a $9.4 million annual cost penalty. The plant would be "high on shareholders list for closure if overstringent and costly conditions are imposed". The EPA's role may be to evaluate complex industries in determining environmental controls but its activity will in many instances be dragged into a political cauldron. This was reflected in the comments yesterday of Mr David Thompson, chairman of Limerick IFA animal health committee. He accused the EPA of producing "a political report" on the cattle deaths.
"The EPA said that whatever adverse circumstances caused the deaths are now absent. How can a scientific body say this if they don't know what the adverse circumstances are in the first place? Are they saying this because of the £20 million industrial cleanup in recent years?"
The business of balancing industry and the environment has never been easy. It looks like getting no easier under IPC.