Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

The issue is whether it gets built. That is the key issue. Deputy Quinn knows the planning laws of this country as well as I. The position of the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Gormley, on the incinerator at Ringsend is the same now as it was a few weeks ago when he made his oral submission to An Bord Pleanála in the Gresham Hotel, something that neither Fine Gael nor the Labour Party bothered to do. It is a measure of the lack of real commitment on the part of Deputies Quinn and Creighton that neither bothered to make an oral submission at that hearing, yet they can find the time to attack the Minister with a spurious media stunt in the House. There has been no U-turn by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Gormley, or by the Green Party. We are opposed, as we always have been, to mass burn incineration, including this proposed incinerator on the Poolbeg Peninsula, and the Minister has been consistent inside and outside this House in that regard.

In conclusion, I repeat that this is a new Government with a new policy on waste management. Incinerating is no longer the cornerstone of waste policy and the Minister has made the point very clearly. To discourage incinerators, the new programme for Government states there will be no put or pay clauses for new incinerators. The emphasis now will be on waste minimisation, deposit and return schemes, re-use, recycling, composting and anaerobic digestion. The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Gormley, will, in the coming months, spell out to the local authorities and to the Environmental Protection Agency the fundamentals of this approach. It is a new approach and one by which the Green Party stands.

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