New enforcement procedures have failed to deter illegal waste operators, notably criminal gangs who are still dumping across the Border, writes Liam Reid.
When the first European Court ruling on illegal waste activity in Ireland is delivered in Strasbourg next week, there is one certainty at least: whatever the opinion of the Advocate General of the court, the illegal waste trucks will continue to trundle along Irish roads.
Next week's ruling emerges from the first prosecution brought by the European Commission against Ireland over failures to enforce waste legislation between 1997 and 2001. If the findings are against Ireland, the Department of the Environment will no doubt argue that there have been considerable improvements since then.
Officials will point to the establishment last year of a dedicated Office for Environmental Enforcement (OEE) within the Environmental Protection Agency. They will argue there are waste management plans in place for every region and that over €7 million in funding was available this year for enforcement by local authorities.
However, even as the court is preparing to make the first ruling, the European Commission is carrying out further inquiries, which may lead to further prosecutions. The inquiries centre on concerns from the Commission that the Irish enforcement system is still not up to scratch to prevent illegal waste activity.
The fact is that the Commission's concerns are borne out by evidence that the efforts have been wholly insufficient. The nature of illegal dumping and waste activity may have changed, but it is still going on.
Whereas in the late 1990s waste operators were brazenly dumping in huge illegal sites such as those uncovered in Wicklow in 2001, the illegal business has changed to moving thousands of tonnes of waste out of the country, illegally.
There have been various "recycling" operations where firms and individuals abuse the system to label waste for recycling to export it out of the country and avoid high landfill costs here.
In terms of one sector, there is evidence of a sophisticated network of illegal waste operators, involving organised criminals in the Border area. These operators take waste from licensed collectors in the Republic at a knock-down price and then either dump it illegally in the North or bring it to Scottish licensed landfills. The activity is highly illegal.
The current enforcement system is patchy at best and has proved inadequate to deal with this waste trafficking. The prosecutions have been sporadic, with at most modest fines in the District Courts, nothing to deter illegal operators who can get share profits of €4,000 per load.
Each local authority is responsible for enforcing waste legislation in its area, and while the EPA has an oversight role, it is only directly responsible for enforcing a limited number of landfills and waste facilities.
There is a small number of dedicated people in local authorities, the EPA and the Garda who have been targeting illegal dumpers, and this number has been growing. The OEE is also heading a task force to tackle the illegal cross-Border activity, and the EPA has said it intends to tackle illegal dumping.
But these efforts, along with the new enforcement network, have some way to go before illegal operators begin to feel the full force of the law.