This State is being arraigned before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg for failing to protect the environment. It is a desperate situation when an Irish Government is so cavalier in its approach to the inheritance of this and future generations that European officials take legal action to force it to behave in a mature and responsible manner. And it isn't a new phenomenon. Successive governments and their civil servants have repeatedly failed to give proper legislative effect to EU directives designed to protect the environment within all member states and to prevent further deterioration of a fragile ecosystem.
The latest move in the EU Commission's campaign against Ireland has led to the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice, Mr Antonio La Pergola, accepting that key aspects of our environmental legislation do not conform with EU directives. Specifically, the Commission argued the Government had abused its discretion in setting excessively liberal and high acreage thresholds under which environmental impact studies were not required when landuse changes were proposed. It held that inadequate protection had been accorded to mountainous areas where 60,000 hectares of land were damaged and overgrazed as a result of intensive sheep farming practices. And it presented evidence of the detrimental effects caused to the environment by the afforestation of peatlands and through mechanised peat extraction.
This case is separate from other proceedings being taken against the Government in the European Court arising from its failure to adequately protect water quality. But the scandal in relation to water quality is just as great. And the official Irish response is depressing. The production of nutrient management guidelines for local authorities by the Department of the Environment and the transfer of responsibility to them for enforcing standards, does not meet the case, especially when sufficient public funding and professional expertise is lacking and an opt-out clause for polluters allows them to plead that remedial measures would be impractical or too costly to implement. Over-use of artificial fertilisers on farms, particularly phosphates, has been identified as a major cause of water pollution. As a result of this and other failures, algal blooms on our major inland waterways are occurring with increasing frequency and water quality is being degraded. Farmers spread 150 per cent more phosphates than is required in their efforts to maximise productivity in the Lee Valley; half of the land surveyed in Nenagh is excessively enriched and two-thirds of the farms surveyed there have inadequate storage facilities for slurry. There has been some, limited, official response in terms of an education programme for farmers. But no decisive action has been taken by the Department of Agriculture. An ESRI report, which proposed the introduction of a tax-neutral, farm nutrient management scheme under which only polluting farmers would pay, was shrugged off in the Budget. It's just not good enough.