Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Harte for raising this matter. The UK Ministry of Defence undertook sea dumping of chemical weapons stocks and conventional munitions as a means of disposing of redundant and surplus stocks and dealing with the legacy of weapons produced in the World Wars. Information on the precise location of the dump sites used by the UK for the dumping of chemical weapons between 1945 and 1957 in waters adjacent to Irish territorial waters and the volume and composition of the weapons has, in the past, been made available to the Government. Information in regard to the dumping off the Donegal coastline has been available since 1986 and in the public domain for a number of years.

The dumping of munitions in the sea does not fall under European Union law. The Oslo Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping from Ships and Aircraft 1972, now OSPAR, is the appropriate forum. The OSPAR Convention applies to the waters of the north east Atlantic and Ireland is a party to the convention.

At the end of the Second World War, in the United Kingdom alone, there was in excess of 1.2 million tonnes of surplus ammunition and bombs. The disposal method adopted by most nations at the time was dumping at sea. Although in some cases the location and type of munitions dumped is well known, the full extent of munitions dumped in the OSPAR area will never be known.

We are not alone in our concern about the use of the sea as a location for dumping such material. Information on the location and type of munitions dumped in the convention area was supplied by contracting parties and published by OSPAR in 2005. The report identified more than 140 dump sites throughout the convention area and this is believed to be the best information available. In general terms, the distribution of known conventional munitions dump sites tends to be in inshore waters whereas chemical weapons were dumped further offshore.

Detailed information on the appearance and types of chemical munitions is given in the OSPAR framework for developing national guidelines for fishermen on how to deal with conventional and chemical munitions encountered at sea. Marine Notice No. 16 of 2001 issued by the Department of the Marine and Natural Resources to all fishermen and other users of the sea relates to explosives and other explosive missiles sighted, picked up in trawls at sea or removed from wrecks. This notice covers chemical and conventional munitions and requires all encounters with such munitions to be reported to the Irish Navy and the Irish Coast Guard.

OSPAR Recommendation 2010/20 on an OSPAR framework for reporting encounters with conventional and chemical munitions in the OSPAR maritime area, updating an earlier OSPAR recommendation in this area, promotes, inter alia, the reporting of encounters with conventional and chemical munitions by fishermen and other users of the sea and its coastline and the establishment of a record of such encounters with the aim of facilitating discussion and informed decisions on the management options for dumping sites. This recommendation applies to contracting parties which are coastal states of the OSPAR maritime area.