Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I also wish to raise the matter of waste. This issue has been in the news a great deal recently. A large section was devoted to it in The Irish Times yesterday, and there was a discussion this morning on "Morning Ireland" regarding the decision of the European Court of Justice.

One aspect of this matter has not been referred to in any publication I have seen in the past week despite all the discussion on it. I do not know if people realise that hundreds and thousands of tonnes of waste are being exported from Ireland and England every week more than half way around the world to China where it is burnt and disposed of to the detriment of the people living in those areas. While we have nice European Union regulations about the disposal of waste and while the Green lobby and others are happy for us not to deal with incineration, landfills or such like, we are washing our hands in a Pontius Pilate fashion, sending our waste to underdeveloped parts of China where ordinary people are choking and suffering from the pollution that goes with getting rid of our waste over there. This is utterly unacceptable.

We require a serious debate on where we stand on incineration and landfill. I accept that we dealt with this matter before. If members of local authorities have neither the possibility nor the political capability of taking decisions on where to put sites, etc., then we should devolve that power to local referenda where people can make a decision on where to locate them from a choice of four or five sites. We had better deal with this matter.

It is utterly unacceptable that we are exporting our filth to clean parts of the world. This is happening at a time when people are writing letters to newspapers all over Europe about the waste of energy in importing kiwi fruit from New Zealand to Europe. Let us compare that with the amount of energy we are wasting sending our dirt to China to pollute and damage the health of ordinary people there. We should cry "Stop" on this one.