Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

With regard to Northern Ireland and the cost of taking back the waste, a figure mentioned at one meeting was that it could ultimately be €30 million. The other issue I want to link to that, which I see as the same issue and which we dealt with before, is that of land remediation in Kerdiffstown, on which €32 million has been spent to date, along with a possible €15 million on the areas included in the report, which amounts to almost €50 million to be spent internally in the State. It will take possibly up to €30 million to sort out the problems arising from illegal dumping outside the State. To me, it represents a phenomenal failure by the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government in protecting the environment that we have to spend up to €80 million of Irish taxpayers' money on cleaning up the illegal dumping that happened under everybody's eyes. One could not drive from Dublin to Cork via Naas without knowing something illegal was happening there for years on end. We all know the cost of what happened. We all saw the smoke for many years. Simultaneously, landfill levies of €75 per tonne were imposed. Perhaps somebody thought that was a good idea to discourage people from going to landfill. However, it incentivised people to move from official landfill sites to illegal landfill sites on the island of Ireland, which we now have to spend €80 million cleaning up. By definition, most of those guys were cowboys, if that is what they were doing, and everybody knows what they were doing. As I am sure they are long gone, it will be impossible to get any money from them. Therefore, the prospect of recovering any of that money is very slim. Are there any similar problems in the system that will hit us again in the next few years? We do not want to come back, whoever is in the next Dáil, to another issue that is costing €50 million to €80 million to clear up. What lessons have been learned in the Department and what risk assessment has been done by the Department in relation to these areas?