Chris Andrews (Dublin South East, Fianna Fail)

I congratulate the Leas-Cheann Comhairle on his appointment and I look forward to working with him for the next five years and hopefully beyond.

I am delighted to have this opportunity to speak because this issue goes beyond incinerators and incineration. Fine Gael's motion has less to do with waste management than with political points-scoring. It will not make any difference to the siting of incinerators anywhere in Dublin or throughout the country.

Ringsend has undergone significant change in the past 25 years. The Poolbeg Peninsula has evolved to a point where it hosts many heavy industries, such as the ESB which is likely to be relocated, port container storage and the sewage treatment plant. This last was a great project that cleaned the water but unfortunately polluted the air. As Deputy Quinn and everyone else living around Dublin Bay is aware, the Shelly Banks, traditionally a bathing place, is now known as the "Smelly Banks". This project was a public relations disaster for Dublin City Council, so it is hard to blame people for distrusting or being disappointed with the way the council has dealt with another major infrastructural project.

The Poolbeg Peninsula is about to change with residential, office and retail development and the relocation of the port and heavy industry. It is likely to become a template for good planning, like the Dublin docklands which is a thriving community. It makes no sense to put infrastructure in an area that is about to become residential. People accuse residents of not wanting this in their back yards. I suspect that most of the Fine Gael Members who signed this motion do not know where the yard is. Anybody who does knows it is full. Incineration here will be a part of our waste management strategy throughout the country. Many of the countries with the best environmental records include incineration in their waste management strategies. We cannot continue to export our waste.

Incineration is better than landfill which is a form of land contamination and is unacceptable. Many houses in Ringsend were built on an old landfill site and residents there believe that the high incidence of cancer in the area is related to the building of homes on a landfill site. It is no longer acceptable to use landfill.

The communities in Ringsend and Sandymount do not need this sort of opportunist motion that attempts to spare the blushes of Fine Gael which has done nothing to oppose the incinerator. If it was on this side of the House, it would do even less.

See this speech in context