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No smoke but plenty of thermal treatment
By Joe Horgan
I have to take my hat off to this Irish government and say that even in the brief time I have been here that they have transformed this country through two acts of political will.
In doing so they have shown the ways in which government can make fundamental differences to how people live. They have done what they were supposed to have done and led from the front.
In the first instance they put a levy on plastic carrier bags, which more or less consigned said bags to history. Though appearing to be a fairly superficial act, it tackled a growing problem here in Ireland in that plastic had become the year round adornment of a million Irish hedges.
Country lanes and boreens were festooned with plastic flags blowing in the wind as the bags escaped into even the most unlikely corners. In acting, the government tackled an intrinsic environmental problem effectively and quickly. We all use cardboard boxes now or durable bags that can be used for years and years. Simple, fundamental and effective.
Secondly, of course, was the smoking ban that was forecast as something to trigger mass civil disobedience. It didn’t.
In the end, people just stopped smoking inside pubs and restaurants and even those of us who thought it was something of a side issue to the reality of a seriously under funded health service had to acknowledge the success of this one.
Maybe it is just that I am a non-smoker, but I don’t quite get those who claim that it has ruined the Irish pub as we once knew it. To have a pint without eyes watering from fag smoke is a pleasure indeed and as a health promotion initiative it must be unrivalled. Again what it shows is how effective good government can be.
In the small town nearest to where we live there has just opened a refuse recycling centre which is fairly state of the art and takes just about everything. Charges are a minimum.
It has to be said that for a smallish town in rural Ireland it is an excellent facility. It again shows that with the right backing and financial support that seemingly intractable problems such as the disposal of the growing household rubbish generated even in rural areas can be overcome.
As it became increasingly clear, with even local dumps becoming full, that the current way of disposing of our rubbish was unsustainable, government had to act, had to intervene, had to offer a lead.
All of these small but intrinsically important cases show that it can. That change can indeed mean progress.
Which makes other government decisions even more disappointing. Bertie’s less than subtle hints that he would have no problem with the proposed road through the Tara valley show in many ways that all the small, subtle, but fundamental victories that government has experienced are the exception rather than the rule.
For all the smoking bans and the plastic bag levies, the environmental record of this regime is not going to be one to boast of. Irish lakes and rivers, Irish fields, Irish wildlife and habitats, they’re all in worse condition than they were some 10 or 20 years ago.
I don’t think Bertie would reject that I just suspect he wouldn’t be bothered by it and would just make his usual snide comments about snails or swans or whatever Dublin in the rare oul’ times nonsense he routinely dismisses the environment or the past as.
So when he spoke last week in the Dáil about ‘thermal treatment’ plants, we should have known that Bertie Ahern hadn’t been browsing the latest environmental literature.
What he was doing was indulging in the scary civil service/politics non-speak of smothering reality with misleading language. What of course he was really talking about was refuse incinerators.
Rubbish burning on an industrial scale. So whilst on local levels we are able to set up excellent recycling and composting centres, on a national scale Bertie has obviously been cosying up to some interesting investment backers again and all of a sudden dirty incinerators have become thermal treatment centres. At least the words are cleaner.
The current site being mentioned is somewhere around Drogheda in Co. Louth. The current Minister for the Environment has spoken out against one in his Wicklow constituency. The Minister for Justice, god help us all, has spoken out against one in Ringsend, which just happens to be in his constituency.
Two other cabinet ministers have spoken out against one in Ringaskiddy in Co. Cork, which also happens to be very close to their constituencies. Yet the government is clearly in favour of it somewhere, which is odd because either it is a very good thing, and we should all want one, or it is not.
Either it is a thermal treatment plant with state of the art disposal facilities that Wicklow, Ringsend or Ringaskiddy would all want or it is the nightmare pollutant that environmentalists claim, in which case nobody would want it in their back yard and certainly no cabinet minister would want in his political backyard.
Thankfully for the people around Drogheda, there is the political process to be gone through yet and the Environmental Protection Agency is conducting open hearings in the area, which should at least let us see democracy in action.
Perhaps it might be worth pointing out though, that, according to press reports, the director of the above agency has already spoken out in favour of incineration and that a former employee of the company seeking to build the incinerator, or thermal treatment plant, sits on the board of the above agency.
Whether that compromises democracy anymore than government ministers being in favour of something they wouldn’t have near them, who knows?
The really sad thing though is that with the smoking ban, the carrier bag levy and the local waste centres even this government has already proved that it can make Ireland a better place.
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