Mr. John McCarthy:

Let us cast our minds back briefly in time to get a sense of the extent to which we have been playing catch-up over 40 years. I think we are in a caught-up space at this stage. The first waste framework EU directive was in 1975. It was 1996, with the introduction of the Waste Management Act in that year, before we had what we could legitimately say was a modern legislative framework to govern waste all the way from collection through to treatment and disposal. Already there was 20 years of catching up to be done. As we moved on we took some progressive steps around waste management plans in terms of what we wanted to achieve. We set out clear targets for recycling and recovery. We are now at the level of European norms. As the Deputy rightly said, it gives me no pleasure to sit here and speak about the extent of public funds going into Kerdiffstown and places across the Border in terms of dealing with the waste that was taken to the North illegally. It is a legacy issue. In terms of the Northern Ireland situation and the repatriation of waste, we have completed work on ten out of the 17 sites, which represents about 86,000 tonnes of waste, at a cost of about €7 million. There are two more sites in our programme for last year and this year to be dealt with, which represents about 12,000 or 13,000 tonnes of waste. After that, there are five remaining sites.