Opinion: Dish the dirt on shame of waste control

SELF-delusion is a common enough condition. I often kid myself that I have a full head of hair until I look in the mirror and am reminded of the bald truth.

Northern Ireland kids itself that it is a clean, green place - even a potential honey-pot for tourists. The truth is less palatable.

Tell anyone that the entire sewage effluent of Bangor's 60,000 residents is discharged untreated into the Irish Sea and the response will be sceptical if not unbelieving.

Likewise, the fact that human waste from 30,000 Larne residents is piped directly and untreated into Larne Lough invites disbelief.

And yet this is the reality of the way we live, a reality that extends to the north coast and numerous rivers and streams.

Things can't be that bad - haven't we just received a full complement of Blue Flags for our bathing beaches, an award that guarantees the highest European standard for bathing water?

Try telling that to the couple I met the other day who own a shop on the east strand at Portrush. They report how visitors regularly complain of the raw sewage washed up on the beach. The surfers tell a similar story - illustrated by some fairly revolting photographs.

And yet this bathing water is tested by Environment and Heritage Service - EHS (the part of the DOE charged with policing the environment) on a regular basis throughout the summer and it passes with flying colours. Curious.

Water Service, another government agency, is Northern Ireland's biggest polluter (the people responsible for sewage on our beaches) but, incredibly, they are immune from prosecution. If you or I were to pollute a river, EHS would have the power to take us to court and have us fined, or worse. Water Service enjoys 'Crown Immunity' and EHS can do little more than write them a stiff letter.

Some in Northern Ireland like to think we are leading the way in dealing with waste. The DOE's 'Wake up to Waste' campaign inspires us to reduce, reuse and recycle.

The only problem is that recycling facilities are few and far between and the DOE has done precisely nothing to reduce government's own waste or even use recycled paper.

DOE has spent thousands on advertising but when it comes to the bit, this is little more than PR puff.

But it's not just the absence of modern recycling facilities that marks Northern Ireland out as one of Europe's grubbier corners, it's where our waste ends up that we should be most ashamed of.

The country is simply littered with illegal landfill sites and many of the legal ones are operated illegally - taking waste they are not licensed for.

Ask EHS how many waste licences there are, as Friends of the Earth did, and they can't tell you. Ask them how many landfill sites have closed over the past two years, as Friends of the Earth did, and they can't tell you.

This is not a case of govern-ment being secretive - they simply don't know.

A colleague of mine describes the waste unit of EHS as being in chaos. That sounds about right to me.

Does any of this matter? Surely a bit of fly tipping can't be much of a problem. But this is not about a dodgy skip hire company dumping the contents of the odd skip in a ditch. It's about vast quantities of waste being dumped in places where there will now be pollution for decades.

THERE is an illegal dump in Co Antrim, which churns out gallons of toxic leachate (the putrescent liquid which oozes from rotting household waste) into a tributary of the Sixmilewater. The Sixmilewater is not only an important fishing river but it is also a source of drinking water.

Recently I visited a family who live close to a landfill site near Garvagh where a dump licensed for 'inert' waste was actually regularly, and illegally, taking household waste including waste from the Republic. The smell, the flies and the disease would make your stomach turn. No one should have to live under siege from swarms of flies. No children should have to suffer infections from rotting waste. No mother and unborn child should be placed at risk from the scientifically documented fact that living near a landfill site significantly increases the risk of birth defects. It took seven years for Coleraine council and EHS to withdraw the operator's licence. And that is just one of a number of similar cases right across Northern Ireland.

This sad tale of both failure to obey the law and failure to enforce it, extends across EHS's other responsibilities.

Landowners cause serious damage to protected wildlife sites and EHS doesn't even know about it - monitoring of our Areas of Special Scientific Interest is patchy to put it mildly.

Strangford Lough enjoys the highest European protection status and yet the Department of Agriculture and EHS between them have allowed the decimation of fantastically important horse mussel habitats through over-fishing.

Ruthless developers damage listed buildings in the knowledge that EHS will de-list them, making way for demolition.

What to do? Government's track record in protecting Northern Ireland's environment is a shameful one.

The only answer is to take environmental protection out of government and give it to an independent body, an Environ-mental Protection Agency.

They have them in England, Wales, Scotland and here in Ireland, south of the border. They even have one in the USA.

Why should Northern Ireland be any different?

Of course, there is no reason other than the fact that the status quo is always preferable for our senior civil servants.

Change can be quite a bother. But resisting change will mean that the clean, green myth will finally be blown and we will have to reconcile ourselves to being the dirty corner of these islands.

So let's not kid ourselves that we live in a clean, green place but let's set about the task of entrusting our environment to a new body led by people who really care.

John Woods is Director (Northern Ireland) of Friends of the Earth (www.foe.co.uk/ni). For more information on a new environmental protection body go to www.epconsultni.org.uk

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