Ringsend, Dublin: Poolbeg Incinerator 'A Baptism Of Fire' Under A Setting Sun

By Victoria White
Creating waste to boost profits of a multi-national’s incinerator in Dublin Bay is a nightmare scenario, says Victoria White.

You have to grab these golden September evenings, as the sun sets in pink splendour and the harvest moon rises. My husband and I brought the dog to Dublin’s Sandymount Strand the other night, and she rocketed off into the far distance.

I have loved that landscape passionately since I was a child and was sure I could walk to Howth across the sand. There is nowhere like that huge, tidal beach, which reflects the sky differently at every stage of ebb and flow. You find yourself thinking it’s worth living in Ireland, where you can walk out into that wilderness within a spit of the capital.

“That’s where they want to put the incinerator,” said my husband, pointing to a spot on the waterfront beside the defunct twin chimneys on the Poolbeg peninsula.

That’s where the city manager has decided to plonk a giant incinerator that will burn half of the country’s residual waste. Dublin City councillors have voted against it some 30 times, including this week, when they again rejected the proposal.

But it has made no difference. The amendments made in 2001 by then environment minister Noel Dempsey to the Waste Management Act of 1996 give the city manager and executive full control of the incinerator decision. But the Department of the Environment creates the conditions in which the executive operates. That’s why we can thank newly-crowned EU agriculture commissioner Phil Hogan for the massive Poolbeg incinerator.

One of Mr Hogan’s first acts as minister for the environment, in 2011, was to strike down the levies on incineration that had been drafted under his predecessor, John Gormley. They would have stopped this incineration project in its tracks. Jens Kragholm, the European vice-president of Covanta, the US multi-national charged with running the facility, told the Sunday Business Post, at the time, that there was “no way” they would go ahead with the project if the levies were in place.

The SBP also reported Kragholm as saying he had met Enda Kenny and Ruairi Quinn in the dying days of the last government and, though he had had no assurances, he had found them “sympathetic”.

The project seems to have been over the line before the election. Shane Ross reports Kildare property developer, Arthur French, who was working for Covanta and had been to a Fine Gael fund-raiser at the K Club in 2010, as saying: “There was no need to meet Phil Hogan. He had his mind made up, and so had the government.”

RPS, the lead engineers on the project, were also delighted that the levies were abandoned. Their group services manager, PJ Rudden, was quoted as saying the abandonment of the incineration levies meant “Ireland is open for business”. RPS have done well out of planning the incinerator, having earned about a quarter of the €100m spent so far. They have become wedded to the council executive on this issue, and were found by High Court Judge McKechnie to have released waste management reports “massaged” to reflect council policy. The judge described the council’s influence here as “unacceptable… in a process apparently carried out in the public interest”.

But RPS are still the lead engineers on the project, apparently stuck in a 20-year-old time-warp with the council executive. The RPS report on which the plan is based still sees the Poolbeg peninsula as an industrial wasteland, rather than as a potential residential, trading and cultural area, bounded by beaches and an ecological park and striking into the sea with the magnificent, 18th century South Wall.

Poolbeg is just downstream from the busy, trendy docklands, workplace of thousands of new Dubliners whose idea of city living includes bike rides to Poolbeg, along a new bridge to the peninsula and, perhaps, on along the coast or up the proposed Dodder Greenway.

The trucks wending their way to this national-sized incinerator will destroy the environment and the health of those who live in the area. Their air quality is shocking and their health outcomes suffer accordingly. What new residents will join them if the incinerator goes ahead? But residents are not part of the vision in the RPS report.

Cancelling the project is seen in the worst possible light — a possible loss of €100m — because the site is meant to have a resale value of only €6m. €6m for a large coastal site, a hop and skip from Grand Canal Dock? Grand Canal Dock, which only a few years ago was another industrial wasteland?

Meanwhile, the projected gains if the super-incinerator goes ahead amount to wishful thinking. While gains from electricity powered by the incinerator are happily factored in, the recent PWC report admits that “heat production for the purpose of district heating is not currently planned, but could be included for a future stage of the planning”. Even still, expected gains to the council from the facility — somewhere between €123.8m and €30.2m over 45 years — are paltry when you consider the loss of the area’s potential. Dublin Friends of the Earth recently reckoned we could save €100m in a year just by conserving energy in our public buildings.

That’s the bigger issue. The super-incinerator incentivises us to waste more. Because the councils have lost the right to run the waste market (with negative consequences for us all, including for Greyhound’s employees), they can’t promise to fuel the incinerator. So, instead, they’ve promised money. Our money.

For the next 15 years, the Dublin authorities will pay the plant’s operator, if and when they can’t deliver enough waste. The “hope” is that we will be generating enough waste to deliver enough profit to Covanta, though to do so it will have to burn more than half of all Ireland’s residual waste. And our waste generation must go up, or our recycling must be capped, to feed the beast.

And that would be a disastrous direction for our country. We have been doing really well at recycling. We are second only to Germany in the EU for recycling our packaging. And while it’s clear there is too much landfill, the landfill levies have worked with recycling, so that we met our landfill-reduction target last year. The RPS report suggests we will bust our 2016 target, but the EPA just says it is “at risk”. There is a role for incineration, as the last possible resort in a series of actions, starting with prevention. But incineration should take a tiny proportion of waste. Incinerators should be small and they should be local. Creating waste to boost the profits of a multi-national’s super-size incinerator, located bang in the middle of Dublin Bay, against the wishes of the people, is a nightmare scenario.

Which keeps reminding me of another nightmare scenario: the building of disgusting concrete bunkers over one of Europe’s most important Viking sites, in an area just about to spring to life.

But sure that could never happen — could it?