Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I wish to share time with Deputy Gilmore. It is the stated policy of the elected members of Dublin City Council, as set out in the Dublin City Development Plan 2005-2011, to oppose the siting of an incinerator on the Poolbeg Peninsula, while it is the stated policy of Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats to build an incinerator on the peninsula, despite what their representatives and candidates in the local area may claim. The Government parties solved this problem by removing all relevant powers from the elected representatives of the people on Dublin City Council and vesting them in civil servants instead. Ministerial diktat runs the waste policy of Dublin city.

The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government claimed last night in the House and on RTE radio earlier, that CHP will be undertaken in Poolbeg. He asserted there would not be incineration and certainly not a mass burn incinerator. What, a normal member of the community not fluent in the jargon of waste management might ask, does CHP mean? CHP stands for combined heat and power. CHP means a mass burn incinerator that extracts both electricity and heat from the incineration process. Does that sound familiar? Is that supposed to be okay? As Shakespeare, the Bard, might have said today: "That which we call an incinerator; by any other name would smell as foul". Officials of Dublin City Council still call this an incinerator. They are not under the cosh of the Progressive Democrats and the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Roche, and his Fianna Fáil colleagues are using the language of public relations. Next, he will tell Members that it is not a tax hike, it is a revenue enhancement.

I take this opportunity to thank the Green Party for tabling this motion and for giving the many Opposition Members of this House who have been vocal on the matter a chance to voice their opinions. Several Government Members will also be keen to make statements. The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Roche, expressed his personal preference many times that no incinerator be located in Wicklow. The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy McDowell, who is not in the House and presumably will not enter the Chamber this evening, has given similar promises regarding the proposed Poolbeg incinerator, including, as Deputy Gormley noted yesterday, in his election literature.

Indeed, the Minister recently issued a leaflet entitled, Michael McDowell is opposed to Dublin City Council's mass burn incinerator at Poolbeg. Therefore, if he has the courage of his convictions, I look forward to seeing him cross the floor this evening to vote in accordance with the documentation with which he has flooded the constituency of Dublin South-East.

At the outset, I wish to declare an interest. I represent the constituency of Dublin South-East and I live less than 500 m from the proposed location of the incinerator. There are valid and logical reasons to oppose the siting of an incinerator at Poolbeg and yesterday's contributions covered many of them. I will draw attention to some specific aspects which I believe are important, as well as introducing some new information to the record.

The choice of Poolbeg is the first in a series of bizarre and illogical decisions made by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. Poolbeg is at the heart of one of the city's most valuable assets, namely, Dublin Bay. The bay is not simply an economic asset in terms of the passenger and freight shipping facilities it provides. It is also a major recreational facility for those living in the city. The proposed S2S, or Sutton to Sandycove promenade, will greatly improve this facility. This is the most populated bay on the island.

Hence, it is bizarre to introduce an enormous industrial plant dedicated to burning waste of all types in the middle of the most scenic part of the city. While the Poolbeg peninsula has long been left idle, the opportunity now presents itself to use it for the benefit of all citizens. The Progressive Democrats have pointed this out in wonderfully graphic literature. They have flooded the constituency with a Sydney, Australia-like image of what that part of the bay could look like. Tonight however, as Deputy Fiona O'Malley informed the House, they will vote for the destruction of that possibility by putting an incinerator at its heart.

It would be remiss of me not to mention my colleagues, Councillors Kevin Humphries and Dermot Lacey, who are four-square behind me and the Labour group on Dublin City Council in respect of this issue.

According to figures released by Dublin City Council officials, 600,000 tonnes of waste will be required to fuel the incinerator each year. This amounts to 1,644 tonnes per day. City officials already accept that at least 140 20-tonne trucks will be obliged to travel through the area each day, as well as an unidentified number, possibly as high as 240, according to the assistant city manager, of smaller bin lorries. More trucks will be required to transport the bottom ash, that is, the residue left over from incineration, back out of the incinerator plant, adding at least 30% to the volume of truck movements.

This is in addition to the already chronic traffic problem afflicting the area, with significant volumes of traffic passing along Strand Road, as well as trucks travelling to and from the port and local building sites. The officials claim that some of the trucks will use the port tunnel. Even if this is the case — they admit that at most, less than half will use the tunnel — the effect on the area will be enormous. There will be dust, dirt, smells and traffic jams.

While my colleague, Deputy Gilmore, is more than capable of expanding on this issue, I suggest that incineration in its present form is now an outdated technology. Many European countries have stopped building new incinerator plants to deal with waste and are concentrating on combined mechanical and biological treatments and large-scale recycling. Historically, recycling in this country has been neglected and recycling on any significant scale has only taken place in recent years. However, there is a serious problem with the Government's basic approach to recycling. For example, no present scheme makes it financially worthwhile for a commercial company to recycle extensively. Companies do not engage in waste reduction in a broad sense because of the associated opportunity cost.

The opportunity cost of not recycling or reducing must be increased greatly. If companies found it more economical to recycle than to simply feed waste into the system, one can be sure that every company in the state would so do. Why can rational market forces not be harnessed to achieve an outcome desired by all, instead of ignoring the market and extolling the motivation of companies while allowing them to dump their waste, which is in effect what is happening? The Labour Party believes it is time for the Government to properly incentivise recycling across the entire spectrum of society, not simply among domestic households.

Our existing landfill systems also leave much to be desired. The days of the dump are long gone. Other European countries intensively manage their landfills and we must do the same. I will leave the more detailed examination of incineration and the other available options to my colleague, Deputy Gilmore.

The particular project that has been mentioned in this motion, namely, the proposed incinerator at Poolbeg, is not quite as cut and dried as it may seem. There are anomalies in the claims made by officials in the tendering and procurement processes and in the manner in which the entire plan has been pushed through from the outset.

Mr. Joe McCarthy, a name which makes officials from the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government quake in their boots as he was one of those who exposed the e-voting machines scandal, recently produced a report on the process, based on what little information he could extract from the Minister and his officials. It is recommended reading for anyone interested in how not to manage a large-scale infrastructural project.

I wish to address several specific aspects of the project that serve as exemplars of how badly managed it has been thus far. The Waste Management (Planning) Regulations 1997 require a waste management plan to include systems to monitor "before, during and after" any changes made by the plan. Chapter 11.3.2. of the waste management plan agreed by the elected members of Dublin City Council requires city officials to record such statistics. However, they will not make such information available to the public and it appears they do not have the information. Starting a project without knowing one's starting point is not simply foolish, it is negligent.

The technical model used to rationalise the decision to build an incinerator at Poolbeg was valid for the period from 1997 to 2011. Only five years remain until the end of this model's lifespan and I find it extremely unlikely that any incinerator will be built and functioning within that timeframe. Therefore, we will be building for a future which we have not even tried to envisage. Again, this is not simply foolish, it is also negligent.

The cost model assumptions involved in the economic rationale for the incinerator are equally outdated. For example, while the interest rates used in the model for the process of construction were calculated at 6.5%, the current European Central Bank rate is 3.75%. The original plan costed the plant at €146 million and the technical model uses the same cost. The siting report, used to determine the premium location, uses a cost of €127 million, while the Forfás review of 2001 refers to a cost of €160 million.

However, Mazars Consultants, which provides costings estimates for large-scale projects, estimates that an incinerator of smaller capacity than that proposed in Dublin would cost €200 million. Must I mention the Dublin Port tunnel to provide the House with a litany of miscalculations in respect of costs?

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