Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I support my colleague, Deputy Quinn, in his devastating critique of the proposal to locate an incinerator in the Poolbeg Peninsula. In recent years we were led to believe that the issue of this incinerator in Poolbeg was the subject of a titanic struggle at Cabinet and that the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform was blocking the publication of the Planning and Development (Strategic Infrastructure) Bill until he managed to get the Poolbeg incinerator excised from it.

The Bill was published, I spent all day working on Committee Stage, and it provides for incinerators. The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government states Poolbeg is not included. However, the only reason it will not be included is because the planning application will have been made before the Bill is enacted and commenced. In other words, the success of the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy McDowell, in having the Poolbeg incinerator removed from the Bill to fast-track infrastructure projects, including incinerators, is only because it will be fast-tracked even faster than the fast-tracking Bill would have permitted.

This Government certainly changed many aspects of waste management. By the time of the next election it will have had ten years in power and it will have fundamentally changed the way in which waste is managed, but not necessarily for the better. It will have changed it from being a public service to a private business. When the Government came into office admittedly the way in which waste was managed was not acceptable from an environmental point of view, but it was a public service mainly operated by local authorities and universally delivered.

Two thirds of the waste collection services are now in private hands as is much of the waste infrastructure. The proposed incinerators will be privately developed as will many new landfills. Waste has become the new means of making money in Ireland's infrastructure. One of the most immediate requirements is for legislation to regulate the operation of the private waste industry from collection through to the end product.

The Government also changed the legislation governing waste management. It took waste management out of the democratic domain and made the entire legislative framework quite undemocratic. The making of waste management plans is now a managerial function in local authorities. The setting of waste charges in local authorities is now a managerial function and is no longer a function of the elected members. It has gone further than that. It set down in legislation what is almost a diktat, a direction which must be followed by local authority managers in drawing up waste management plans.

Over the past nine years, the Government established a framework and infrastructure for waste management for the next 20 to 25 years. Incineration is at the heart of that. One of the first acts of the present Government after its election in 1997 was to require that waste management plans be drawn up on a regional basis rather than on a county basis. The rationale was that each of those regions would have an incinerator. The regions were the catchment for the incinerator.

On leaving office, this Government will leave behind a waste management legacy which will be quite difficult to unravel and put right. It will require a change in legislation, regulation of the private waste management industry established under the present Government, and a move to a different way of dealing with waste rather than the way the present Government has made incineration the centre of the strategy from which everything else flows. The collection system is predicated on incineration.

It would have been far better if the Government had concentrated on investment in building up a recycling infrastructure which would have treated waste as a resource rather than a problem which must be disposed of. It will certainly leave behind a major mess which will be an enormous challenge to the next Government.

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