Mr. Jim Crilly:

It gets a licence in 2001 to emit 1 kg per hour. The factory is pumping out 60,000 m3 of gas an hour. It effectively has permission to emit waste gas at 17 mg per kg. The best available technology not entailing excessive costs, BATNEEC, guideline is 10 mg per kg. Therefore it is allowed to exceed the recommended guidelines by 70% for six years because it does not have to meet the guidelines until 1 January 2006. Between 2001 to 2005, inclusive, it has been given permission by the EPA to exceed the levels.

What about the other two brick factories in the country? Fleming's Fireclay in Laois had a limit set on it at the same of 0.35 kg per hour. Our boys get 1 kg per hour. Kingscourt Brick gets 0.25 kg per hour. So Cement Roadstone Holdings - Ormonde Brick - is given a very high emission rate and five years to come to the agreed standard. There are two kilns producing 60,000 m3 an hour.

In October 2001, Ormonde Bricks closed down kiln 1, the dirtier of the two kilns. It is recorded in 2000 as knocking out 50 kg per hour. It would never meet the standard of 10 kg per hour. The company also said it was a quiet time in the business and there was not a big demand for bricks. But it did not change the permitted emission of 1 kg. Therefore 1 kiln that is now producing 33,000 m3 is still allowed to pump out 1 kg per hour and therefore the concentration, without breaking the licence, has gone up to more than 30 mg per kg. That is a problem; it is the problem. When people ask where the fluoride came from, that is where there fluorride came from because for five years, operating 24 hours a day, it has been pumping that out.

When the factory received its preliminary determination before the licence was issued, it requested that the two things be increased - that the 5 kg go up to 10 kg. That was fair enough because the BATNEEC allows for 10 kg. However, it wanted the 1 kg pushed up; it was not even happy with that. The EPA replied and said "the potential ambient impact of this fluoride emission does not support permitting a discharge in excess of 1 kg/h" and that "no scope exists for a higher discharge limit for HF, even as a temporary expedient". It would exceed the TA Luft emission value, maximum 98 percentile, which is the guideline value because there is no legislation on emissions. That is something maybe the people here should be looking into, that we would use the German guidelines. The EPA stated quite specifically that anything in excess of 1 kg cannot happen.

That is in 2001 when they were talking about 1 kg equalling 17. From 2002 to 2005, 1 kg was equal to 30 so they were exceeding the emission levels that would have an adverse effect on the environment. That was it, that was our licence.

That is the licensing and then there is the enforcement and monitoring, which is done by a different outfit in the EPA. The results of the monitoring of emissions shows that in 2000 they were producing 50. In 2001, it was 28; 2002, 54; 2003, 58; 2004, 46; 2005, 37; 2006, 25; and 2007, 27. They were exceeding the limits every year. Seventeen is as much as can be put out without damaging the environment. They were consistently knocking out anything up to 50. The factory closed in 2008 because they gave up. There was too much pressure and too many people asking too many questions. These figures relate to fluoride.

One other issue I have to mention is the cadmium. I found the cadmium in the gutters. I took grab samples from the roof gutters of Mr. Brennan's farm and I found cadmium levels there. Cadmium behaves like a gas. Particulate matter PM 10 is the stuff that comes out of a dirty diesel engine. PM 2.5 is the one that is causing problems in urban areas because it is a very small particle and it can penetrate deep into the lungs. Cadmium adheres to particles of less that PM 1 according to an EU report on cadmium. Cadmium is enriched in the fine particles mode about or below 1 micron and consequently can penetrate deeply into the respiratory system and have a long residual time in the atmosphere. It states that cadmium emitted from the factory has "a zero deposition velocity". This means that it just floats. It does not go up or down. It got worse with the rain on the roof of Mr. Brennan's sheds and collected in the gutters, which is where I found it.

When I told the people from UCD in 2007 that I had found cadmium in 2004, they included cadmium in their monitoring of the farm. They did various weight trials and the stuff Mr. Brennan talked about. They started to find cadmium in the blood of the animals at levels that are indicative of toxicity. The break point is 40. They were getting figures of 80,100 and 200. This was at the start of the season, up until April. Samples were taken every month. The 600 blood samples that came from Mr. Brennan's farm over the next five months were contaminated with cadmium. The IAS Laboratories in Bagenalstown prepared the samples before sending them to a German laboratory for analysis. It is an approved laboratory for cadmium. They do not just keep it beside the bench beside the sugar in the canteen. They know what cadmium is. They managed to contaminate 600 samples. The processing of these samples occurred over a period. It was not just one point. It went on for a period but it got diluted out. One could actually see, the samples that were done one particular morning were clean. Then from 11 a.m. on they started picking up 6,000 parts of cadmium. The ones they did the next day were down to 4,000 and then the next day 2,000 and the next day 1,000, 500, 80 and so on. There was one contamination event at the start and then everything that went into it after that got slightly less contamination over time. They managed to make it impossible to confirm that there was cadmium in the cattle. Even though there was some before and after, the IAS people always maintained that the samples were contaminated and that they could not look at them because the did not mean anything. As a result, we could not do anything except bloods. However, we had kidneys. Cadmium accumulates in the kidney over time in both humans and cattle. Twenty three of Mr. Brennan's cattle were analysed for cadmium in their kidneys. The legal maximum for food consumption in the EU is 1 part per million, ppm. We found up to 5 ppm in old cows. They said that it was unusual but that it did not prove anything because other cows in different parts of the country had been found with five ppm of cadmium in them. We had no national database with which to compare Mr. Brennan's 23 cows.

Subsequently, as part of the European Food Safety Authority study, they took samples of 380 cattle at slaughter aged from two to 16. I have two graphs here. One graph is related by age and it shows a 16-year-old cow and a two-year-old cow. There is a straight line going up and the slope of the line is 0.133, which means that every year the milligram per kilogramme figure goes up by 0.133.

Mr. Brennan's cattle were tested. Every year on his farm the increase was by 0.25. His cattle were accumulating kidney cadmium at twice the rate of the national average. The other issue about the kidney cadmium from all the farms is they stratified them all across Ireland. They got a strong linear relationship between the level of cadmium in the soil and the level of cadmium in the cows. This is to be expected. It will happen mostly through soil ingestion. Cadmium does not get into the grass but when cattle are eating dirty, parched ground up to 10% of their intake is actually soil. Ingestion is main the pathway for cadmium contamination. They got a nice predicted line that showed that their high cadmium contamination levels were on farms that had high levels of cadmium in soil, from 1.5 up to 2.0. This was in County Meath and north Kildare near Tara Mines which is the largest lead and zinc mine in Europe. Lead, zinc and cadmium all go together so geo-chemical pollution occurs. That area was rotten with cadmium. We expected that because Mr. Brennan's farm is here and beyond here that his soil cadmium concentration should be very high. They took 54 soil samples from the farm in 2007. All 54 samples were below the level of detection of 0.1 mg per kg. There is 0.5 mg per kg and there is 1 mg per kg. All 54 samples were less than 0.1 mg per kg. They were off the fecking scale. This indicates to me that the people who were taking those samples and analysing them did not know what they were doing. There is now way that 54 samples were less than the limit of detection for cadmium. We did our own analysis and it came out at about 0.25 mg per kg or 0.35 mg per kg, which would be the normal range for Kilkenny. These numbers are still down at the bottom of the graph. There is no way the excess cadmium in the kidneys of Mr. Brennan's cattle came from the soil or the herbage; it was by inhalation. The average of that is 0.25 mg per kg. Mr. Brennan had an eight month old calf that was never out of the house. It was slaughtered and analysed in the Regional Veterinary Laboratory in Kilkenny and it was accumulating cadmium at a rate of 0.75 mg per kg. It was eight months old and never out of the house. Where was it getting five times the national average rate of cadmium?

It was coming out of the chimney. The EPA looked at the cadmium three times from the factory. The first time it looked at it, it found it was 180 times the technical instructions on air quality control or TA Luft guidelines. It found that 180 times more cadmium was coming out of the chimney than was permitted. The EPA did not report that to any of the other agencies in the interagency group or any of the other researchers. The agnecy knew this in September 2004.

Every report that was done on Mr. Brennan's farm is similar. I will quickly tell the committee what they said. The veterinary laboratory report of 2006 found that gases in particular analyses were found to be below designated emission thresholds or below limits of detection and, thus, further investigations into animal health were not deemed necessary. That is important. The EPA told the veterinarians not to bother looking for it because it could not find it; it was not there so they should not waste their time. That was before I told Savera Health I had found it and it started including it and then the blood samples all got contaminated. That was in 2006.

In 2008, it had an expert group comprising five international people from the UK and America. The group reported that:

The EPA has commissioned a significant amount of monitoring the atmospheric emissions from kiln 2. None of these substances were found to be present at significant concentrations in the emissions.

This means the EPA gave this independent group that was to review the operation of the factory and the monitoring of the EPA all the data. The group was not told about the cadmium that was coming out in September 2004 because it would have mentioned it. It did not mention it, however.

The final report of the interagency group in 2010 included oral petitions to the European Parliament's Committee on Petitions, PETI, in 2012. One document I secured from a freedom of information request was an email from the EPA to Savera, which stated "the cadmium emissions recorded in September were 0.24 g per hour." An email from the EPA to the researchers in UCD stated that "the cadmium emissions recorded in run 1 on 15 April 2004 were 0.24 kg per hour." They were 1,000 times higher. The EPA reported grams instead of kilograms and stuck with that story right up until we produced the actual report from scientifics that said it was kilograms. Then, the EPA backtracked. It did a modelling exercise to show that emissions from the factory at 200 times the TA Luft guidelines would still have no negative effect on Mr. Brennan's farm. Mr. Brennan's farm is 12 m from the chimney. It is right across the road. Mr. Brennan's farm starts and then goes up the hill. The EPA said that it modelled the emissions at 200 times the guidelines. The observed reading was 180 and the EPA said that to be sure, it would go to 200. It did dry deposition modelling, however, which is for that big PM10 stuff we were talking about. It does not travel to Mr. Brennan's land. A person could have the dirtiest diesel engine in the world down in the factory and Mr. Brennan would not smell the diesel. When we are talking about PM1, PM0.1 and PM0.5 with a zero-deposition velocity, however, and there is an inversion layer on a winter's day around places operating 24 hours per day, that will get into Mr. Brennan's shed. It will get into his calf and cause it to get a shitload of cadmium and die from it. Therefore, cadmium and fluoride were both there in significant enough amounts to affect the animals. The final inter-agency report said it was not. I will finish there because I am only getting excited and I do not want to be.