Burn, Tricky Dicky, Burn

A few weeks ago, while nearly all of us were transfixed by the US presidential election, the Irish government tried to bury some bad news. It didn't get past me, though I was as transfixed as anyone.

So much so that I even stayed up to watch the vice-presidential debate, so that at 3.30 in the morning when I should have been dreaming of a threesome with Cameron Diaz and Denise Richards, Dick Cheney was looking me straight in the eye and telling me that if I didn't vote for him that Osama bin Laden would sneak into my bedroom and chop off my testicles and use them for table tennis balls. It was a bit late, I might have misheard him, but that was the general gist. Then John Edwards told me how his father, an unemployed mill worker learned to read by watching educational programmes on TV, and I nearly started crying.

What bad news was that again? Oh, yeah, the government are going to build two toxic waste incinerators that will set our recycling programme back years and give thousands of people cancer.

I kind of sensed this was going to happen. The Irish planning process is a bit like a Hollywood movie; the government put all sorts of obstacles in the ‘developers’ paths, so much so that it looks at times that they’ll never make it, but you know in the back of your mind that there’s only going to be one winner and it’s not the people who’s views are being spoiled, whose air is being polluted, whose walks are being closed off and whose house prices are being pushed down. It seems that An Bord Pleanala has rubber-stamped all fourteen applications for new motorways this year.

To see for myself how stacked the process is against the objectors, I visited the oral hearing just round the corner from where I’m writing this. (There’s no limits to my pursuit of journalistic truth.) Though there’s massive evidence that incineration is linked with cancer and birth defects and long-term pollution of ground water, the hearing decided that this was none of their business. Who’s business was it, then? The Environmental protection Agency, who are all government appointees. The ruling that environmental effects were not within their remit was a Kafkaesque one, as if planning laws don’t pertain to the environment then what do they pertain to?

The set-up at the hearing neatly symbolised the government’s attitude to those who dare to question their descisions. While the representatives of Indaver, the Belgian firm who want to burn our waste and pollute our air were given seats and tables around the chairman, while members of CHASE, the main group objecting were forced to sit with the crowd and make their way to the front one by one to make their depositions. Then it became more Keystone Kops than Kafka when they had to adjourn for three hours while they got the sound system working.

After that, two weeks of tortuous discussions as the objectors tried to include environmental arguments within the parameters of the hearing. This process was briefly enlightened when, in the middle of an appeal by CHASE’s lawyers to have environmentalist arguments heard which was being conducted in particularly arcane legalese, legendary Cork protester Pat “The Picket” Allen got up and shouted in his stentorian voice “How can you ban smoking and at the same time build an incinerator?” which showed that if he didn't grasp the complexity of some of the legal arguments being used to oppose the incinerator, at least, like the rest of us who live in the Cork area, he intuitively understands that it’s not a good idea.

Even after all that, the chairman of the hearing recommended that the incinerator not be built, he was overruled by the other thirteen members of an Bord Pleanala, which makes civic participation in the planning process seem like a pathetic illusion.

The next option for CHASE was to go to the High Court for a judicial review, which as the high court are all Fianna Fail appointees, they’d certainly have lost, at a cost of E1 million, then a supreme court hearing before reaching the promised land of the European court, where they might have got a decision in their favour. Unfortunately, it seems this isn't going to happen.

The government claim that science is on their side, and would like people to think that the likes of CHASE are ignorant luddites who are holding back progress. The scientific community is such a fractious, back-stabbing and generally bitchy one that anyone who claims to have them on their side is telling a big porky pie. It’s said that history repeats itself and that historians repeat each other, but if scientists repeat each other’s ideas it’s only in order to discredit them.

CHASE have brought over many scientists who’ve at the very least provided a reasonable doubt that the technology behind incineration is a safe one. For evidence that incineration isn't a safe technology, google the words “Russians poison Yushchenko” and see what happens. You’ll get some before and after shots of the Ukrainian Pro-Western leader. A few months ago he looked like a sprightlier, straighter Peter Mandelson, now his eyes are bloodshot, his skin is ruddy and his hair is receding. It looks like the Russians have used some chemical made by a mad scientist who rubs his cat while he waits for James Bond to arrive. In fact it appears that they’ve used dioxins, the very same chemical compounds that are generated by incineration.

The government use the term ‘incineration’ or the even more euphemistic, even Milosevician, ‘thermal treatment’ to describe what they want to do in Ringaskiddy and Co. Meath. What they actually want to do, in more literal terms, is bring toxic, domestic and industrial waste from all over the country and set them alight in those two plants, pumping the smoke into the atmosphere and burying the ash generated in landfill. This process creates new chemical compounds that, not surprisingly, this can create health problems for those who live in any sort of proximity.

Even some of the proponents of incineration admit that this method of waste management may be linked with the unusually high levels of birth defects and lung cancer in the areas around incinerators. (More details can be found at www.greenpeace.org.uk) However, they try to convince us that these were as a result of old-fashioned, mass-burn incineration and that new filter technology traps any dangerous compounds that are created. It’s a dangerous, bogus, argument, as only a virtually invisible speck of toxic dust needs to be inhaled before someone can fall victim to one of the many diseases with which dioxins are linked.

Even if you don't accept the health arguments, and not all scientists do, it seems, there’s the bigger waste management picture to be looked at. The government claim that they are pro-recycling and put out more annoying ads than you can shake a stick at to remind us of this. The incentive for local authorities to do so will be drastically reduced if there’s an incinerator, which needs a certain amount of waste to keep it going and will pay them to take waste off their hands so they can burn it.

They claim that this will generate enough heat to heat 20,000 houses but this is a bit like burning all your furniture in order to save money on coal. Some of the things being burned include petrochemical products like plastic and synthetics which are made from oil, which is clearly in short supply. Others, like drinks cans are made from aluminium, which there is plenty of, but it takes thirty times as much energy to mine and process aluminium as it does to recycle it.

They claim that building and running the incinerators will provide quite a few jobs. Not the country has an unemployment problem at the moment, but there’s up to a hundred times as many jobs in recycling.

They claim that the EU are insisting that all countries deal with their own toxic waste, an argument which would be more compelling if we were implementing Kyoto or if the likes of Fatty Harney didn't regard the prospect of EU tax harmonisation as an unacceptable loss of sovereignty. In any case the toxic waste incinerator will need seven times the amount of toxic waste Ireland currently produces to keep it going. Under the good Friday agreement we can take waste from Northern Ireland and therefore from the rest of the UK, so not for the first time in history the British will be effectively exporting disease to Ireland.

So who will save us from the governments lies and the diseases that they will create? Step forward, An Taisce, the heritage board which has been compared to the Gestapo by the new environment minister, which isn't a particularly encouraging development.

Personally I’d love if Dick Roche was right and An Taisce had the same arbitrary powers as the Nazi secret police. I’d love if they could have got the O’Connor brothers who turned the Old Head of Kinsale into a golf course into a darkened room and shone a bright light into their faces and told them that had vays of making zem talk and made them live entirely on granola and soya milk until they recanted. I’d love if they could burst into the offices of the National Roads Authority wearing long coats made from Hemp and made them watch Braveheart over and over again till they decided that building a motorway through the hill of Tara isn't a good idea.

An Taisce, sadly, have none of these powers, though, though Dick Roche will relish the fight with them anyway. It’s questionable what Commissar Ahern’s motives for appointing him were. Lately he seems to have regarded the position as an obstacle course for people on the way to bigger things. Now he seems to be throwing down the gauntlet to environmentalists, who he and Fatty Harney seem to think are holding the country back with their obstinate insistence that money isn't the only thing that matters.

I’ve got very little faith in any government or judicial body to stop the incinerators. I do have some faith in people power, and if even a fraction of the 23,000 objectors in the Cork Harbour area were willing to stand in front of the bulldozers in Ringaskiddy then the unthinkable might happen and Fianna Fail might admit that they’ve made a mistake. This tactic worked when the government tried to build a nuclear plant at Carinsore Point in the seventies and hopefully it’ll work again.

So hopefully the only things that’ll be burned in Ringaskiddy will be effigies of Dick Roche, Red Ahern, Martin Cullen, Noel Dempsey, Fatty Harney, who as health minister should be opposed, and Michael McDowell because... well, he’s Michael McDowell.