The Minister for European Affairs, Dick Roche, took me severely to task in a letter to this newspaper last Tuesday. I had written two weeks ago about Ireland's disgraceful record of flouting EU environmental law. Not so, claimed the Minister; we're really among the best in Europe, writes Mary Raftery.
However, on the very same day of Dick Roche's letter, the EU Commission singled out Ireland in its new "name and shame" policy of targeting countries in breach of EU law. At present, four countries have been identified in this manner. And yes, you guessed it: Ireland, with nine cases identified, is the worst so far. In future EU statements only Italy will turn out to have more cases highlighted in this way by the Commission. It is also worth remembering that even these nine cases for Ireland are only the tip of the iceberg.
Mr Roche wrote in glowing terms of Ireland's rate of transposition of EU law into Irish law - 98.8 per cent, he crowed, the fourth best in Europe. This has now become the Government's mantra on the issue. In a short radio interview during the week, the Minister for the Environment, Martin Cullen, managed to repeat it verbatim no fewer than seven times.
The Government's approach provides a perfect example of the art of disinformation. Transposition is an entirely different issue to that highlighted by the EU last Tuesday and indeed by myself two weeks ago. It merely means the technical process of writing EU law into the legal system of a member-state. It has nothing whatsoever to do with either the quality of such local legislation or, more importantly, with breaches of it.
All of the nine cases against Ireland highlighted by the EU relate to actual breaches of directives. Again it is important to remember that most of them directly concern the health of each and every one of us, in the areas of air pollution, drinking water pollution, contamination of shellfish and illegal waste disposal.
What, in effect, Dick Roche and Martin Cullen are doing is an old trick. If, for the sake of argument, one were to condemn the quality of apples produced in this State, they hit back immediately claiming that it's not true, because they can prove that the quality of cherries is excellent.
The fact remains that over the past five years Ireland has had a dismal record of infringing EU law on the environment, which has made us, per capita, the worst in Europe. A table produced last October by the Environmental Committee of the European Parliament clearly outlines Ireland's atrocious record, giving an accumulated total of 85 cases in which Ireland had been notified by the EU of breaches of the law since 1998.
One of the worst aspects of Ireland's behaviour in this regard has been a pattern of ignoring warnings from the Commission. This constitutes a breach of Article 10 of the EC Treaty, and has itself resulted in a number of further infringement cases, initiated at considerable cost to the EU, simply to attempt to get Ireland to reply to its letters. Including these and some other cases, the total figure for Ireland amounts to the 118 I referred to in my previous article, and which Dick Roche disputes. There is undoubtedly a difficulty with figures emerging from the EU, principally related to the fact that the categorisation of cases is constantly changing. As they move through the process towards a court hearing, many individual complaints are grouped together into a single case. An example of this is the illegal waste disposal case against Ireland identified by the EU last Tuesday.
It in fact concerns five separate instances, which would have begun life as five individual cases, but are now grouped as one.
A further and more extreme example can be seen in another major document released by the EU last Tuesday. This is the Commission's 2004 Internal Market Scoreboard, from where the Irish government gets its 98.8 per cent transposition figure.
However, if you look at the infringements table, the picture is not quite so rosy. Here Ireland is in the mid-range in Europe, with 55 infringement cases open against it. This is identified by the EU as an increase over last year's figures. However, when you then examine the 2003 scoreboard, Ireland is listed as having at total of 132 cases open against it.
What has of course happened is that the system has changed the way it counts infringement cases, and has grouped a number of similar cases together under single headings.
Consequently, what appears at first sight to be a dramatic drop is in fact the opposite.
Interestingly in this regard, the EU identifies Ireland (with France) as having the worst record in the EU for its willingness to solve infringements quickly. The EU makes it very clear that infringements of this kind "cause wholly unnecessary harm to the European economy".
Overall, it is clear that the Irish Government's record of breaching EU law is something that we as EU citizens should be deeply ashamed of. And the simple truth is that no amount of playing devious games with figures can hide this.