Dr. Tom Ryan:

I will start with dealing with complaints and fines. The EPA has no control over the fines set in the legislation and imposed by the Judiciary. Our general enforcement approach has been to respond quickly to complaints about sites. We send out an inspector to make an assessment and if we can impose some requirement on the licensee to carry out abatement immediately or after a while, we find that to be the quickest and most effective way to get the best environmental outcome and try to improve the quality of the environment or to abate the nuisance that has been reported to us, if it is verified. That is our general stance in dealing with these matters. However, we take prosecutions where and when we consider it appropriate, and we have a record of doing that.

Turning to the emissions from the incinerator plant in Poolbeg, we are all familiar with the white clouds that emerge.

The process within the facility is that waste of a certain prescribed type is brought into the plant, burnt on the incinerator grate and the exhaust fumes are taken through a series of abatement measures that scrub out the pollutants and clean the exhaust air with the best available techniques. The residual that goes out through the stack is water vapour and small quantities of whatever residual materials have come through the system. All our measurements on and off site show that any residual materials coming through over the past couple of years have been within safe environmental limits. The plumes that are seen are to a large extent water vapour. We continually monitor that. The monitoring of the emissions is a defence in depth where there is monitoring on site by the operator, by us and off-site ambient monitoring by the EPA.

With regard to our presence on site it is a facility that we visit very frequently, this year alone we have been there 13 times. It is a site that we pay particular attention to.