Environment

Village last month reported that Wicklow County Council has agreed to sell a prime town-centre site in Bray to developer Paddy McKillen’s Navybrook Ltd for just €2.6m. The deal is contingent on Navybrook delivering a commercial development by the end of 2019.  It is also a controversial sale that has raised questions about value for money. Most Councillors and most residents of Bray want the site developed. Known as the ‘Florentine’, it has been vacant for 20 years, but has also served meanwhile as a convenient car park with 225 spaces. A Council official in January told Wicklow County Council that the site is actually worth more as a paying car park than as a development site. “There’s not huge value in this for developers”, he claimed. But a related effect of the sale of that site to Navybrook is now proving controversial too. For it transpires that Council officials set aside a sum almost equivalent to the Florentine’s sale price to buy and demolish two large inhabited houses at Herbert Road nearby in order to extend another surface car park by up to 100 spaces.  The proposed new spaces are seen by some residents as an incentive or subsidy to the purchaser of the Florentine site. The original Council budget for the extra spaces appears to have been only about 10% less than what that Navybrook has agreed to pay for the Florentine. Wicklow County Council might have insisted on any purchaser of the Florentine erecting a multi-storey with 356 car spaces, instead of the 256 now planned there. Had Wicklow County Council insisted on 100 more car spaces at the Florentine, it would still have been fewer than had been required as a condition, when planning permission was granted for the Florentine site to an earlier owner.  One previous planning permission for an earlier proposed development on the Florentine site, one that included apartments, had required 417 parking spaces. Wicklow County Council acquired the site at a bargain-basement price during the recent crash. It believes that the Florentine will yield it commercial rates of up to half a million euros annually when completed. The County Council itself sought planning permission for the Florentine before selling the site to Navybrook. The inspector for An Bord Pleanála pointed out that objectors had stated that the Council was not making sufficient allowance for car parking, with provision being promised for just 256 spaces. The inspector’s report included a statement that applying car-parking standards in the, then-current, Wicklow county development plan 2010-2016 would have meant that “504 spaces would be required”. But Wicklow County Council insisted that 256 spaces were enough, and An Bord Pleanála accepted the Council’s assurances. Permission was granted last year. Just one month later the Council was engaged nearby in private negotiations to buy St Paul’s Lodge and another big house, both adjacent to the existing surface car park on Herbert Road which is an area zoned for mixed use. Local residents were not informed, but the prospective purchasers were told that Wicklow County Council wanted to buy their houses, and that the purpose for which the Council wanted them was additional parking.  The owners first sought €1.5m each (as opposed to the €765,000 valuation that the Council’s own surveyor put on one of the houses last year). In the end, only the sale of St Paul’s Lodge went ahead, for €913,000 including the vendor’s legal and other costs (such as furniture removal to Spain). The Council thus acquired an Edwardian home and large garden that officials hope to clear for up to 47 hard-surface car spaces. Bray residents (including myself) oppose the Council’s proposal to destroy St Paul’s Lodge, on architectural and social grounds among others, pointing out that it was reportedly designed by the architect of Farmleigh House, and that destroying family homes during a housing shortage pushes up the cost of new homes for everyone. Hearing rumours of the Council’s wish to destroy part of their neighbourhood, residents tried between June and October last year to elicit information from Wicklow County Council. We were told by the Council simply that, “We are examining all aspects of parking in the town at this time”. In fact Council officials were then intent on closing the purchase of St Paul’s Lodge as quickly as possible.  Council officials concluded the purchase of St Paul’s Lodge unconditionally, despite the fact that it was bought solely “in order to raze it to the ground and build a car park on the site”, as the vendor’s solicitor put it last July. It is an extraordinary fact of current law that Council officials have great freedom to spend public money on acquisitions without the approval of elected representatives. However, approval is required to demolish or dispose of a building, and the process of securing approval in such a case requires public consultation under a provision known as ‘Part 8’. But what kind of consultation? In this case Wicklow County Council ignored expressions of concern by local residents and inserted no provision in the contract of sale contingent on Council approval. The Council closed the sale without first completing the consultation concerning possible demolition. This has put Councillors under pressure to approve demolition. The house could be put back on the market. There is a strong demand for such houses in the immediate vicinity, and at least one older and bigger house nearby (in bad shape) was recently bought and substantially renovated. But the fact that officials paid above what their surveyor considered to be the house’s normal market value could leave the Council out of pocket from any resale. Residents had their request for a meeting ignored by Council management, and have been forced to take an appeal to the Office of the Information Commissioner to get some documents eventually released that reveal details. The first site notices of planned demolition were not clearly visible from the road and none at all was put on the property of St Paul’s itself. A new notice was

Eschatology, or the study of the end of times, is at least as old as the written word. The concept spans many of the world’s major religions, usually referring to some future day of judgement or reckoning. Beyond the realms of theology, eschatology as a concept is currently undergoing something of a renaissance, especially after the tempestuous and chaotic first twelve months of the Trump regime. In this time, almost everything we once took for granted about inherent stability, even inevitability, of western democracies and the robustness of our institutions has been shaken profoundly. As if to add to the sense of impending calamity, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their famous Doomsday Clock for 2018 forward in late January– to two minutes to midnight. This is the closest it has ever been to the witching hour. The authors of the Bulletin excoriated the US government’s reckless nuclear brinksmanship, but poured special scorn on its efforts to derail international climate diplomacy. “Avowed climate denialists have been installed in top positions at the EPA and other agencies, and the administration has announced its plan to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In its rush to dismantle rational climate and energy policy, it has ignored scientific fact and well-founded economic analyses”. The Bulletin was particularly scathing of the role played by climate deniers in stymieing action. “Despite the sophisticated disinformation campaign run by climate denialists, the unfolding consequences of an altered climate are a harrowing testament to an undeniable reality: The science linking climate change to human activity is sound. The world continues to warm as costly impacts mount, and there is evidence that overall rates of sea level-rise are accelerating – regardless of protestations to the contrary”. The toxic wave of US science denialism has swept right across the Atlantic. As previously reported in Village, last May saw the first meeting in Dublin of the self-styled Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) a denialist group with opaque membership and funding sources. February sees it host its fifth meeting in just 10 months, featuring a fringe Italian academic with strong ties to US neoliberal think tanks, the latest in a procession of climate contrarians to present new (thoroughly debunked) ‘findings’ to an eager audience mostly of Irish contrarians and deniers. Their agenda appears to be to hobble effective Irish government response to the existential threats posed by climate change. Their standard operating method is to cherry-pick data, float red herrings and exaggerate uncertainties in the scientific consensus often as political cover on behalf of special-interest groups, for continued inaction. Above all, groups like the ICSF are engaging in ‘post-truth’ assaults on reason itself. A recent edition of New Scientist magazine stated baldly: “There are disturbing hints that western civilization is starting to crumble”. The article quotes intriguing research from Yale university, which examined the two broad modes of human thought: 1) fast, automatic and inflexible, and 2) slower, more analytical and flexible thinking. As flexible thinkers within society solve our various problems, from transport to energy, with complex technologies, this relieves the great bulk of the population from even being aware of these problems, and so inflexible, automatic thinking ensues as the population, in a sense, dumbs down, since technologies can create the beguiling illusion that life is magically simple. One of the psychologists who developed this theory, Jonathan Cohen, suggests this may help solve one of the great puzzles regarding societies heading for catastrophe: why do they persist with their self-destructive behaviour, in the face of overwhelming evidence of future harms? “The train had left the station”, according to Cohen, and the forward-thinking, analytical types were no longer at the controls. As flexible thinkers within society solve problems with complex technologies, the population is relieved from even being aware of these problems, and so inflexible, automatic thinking and dumbing-down, ensue Separately, computer modelling carried out at the University of Maryland in 2014 examining the mechanisms that can lead to local or even global system collapse, identified two key elements. The first, unsurprisingly, is ecological strain. The panoply of chronic environmental stressors, including resource depletion, widespread pollution, ocean acidification and sea-level rise are generally well understood, at least in expert circles. What was less widely known was the systemic risk posed by economic stratification or, in plain language, the rich getting richer at everyone else’s expense. In the scenario modelled, “elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour”, according to author Rachel Nuwer. Eventually, she argues, “the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities”. She notes that the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Here, extreme inequality and ecological stresses converge to form a toxic cocktail capable of crashing our civilisation into the dust. US academic Thomas Homer-Dixon published the influential book: ‘The Upside of Down’ in 2005. It presciently anticipated the global economic crash that occurred some three years later. The financial crisis was, he wrote, one of “five tectonic stresses which are accumulating deep beneath the surfaces of our societies”. Others include population, energy, pollution and resource exhaustion; and climate system stress. The 2008 economic crisis, along with more recent shocks, such as Brexit and the Trump election in 2016 can, according to Homer-Dixon, be seen as a series of non-linearities, or sudden and unexpected jolts to the assumed world order. These may be viewed as a random pattern of tremors presaging a truly global catastrophe, a word that derives from the Greek, meaning ‘to overturn’. To view catastrophe as imminent rather than already occurring requires a deeply anthropocentric perspective. The sequestration, plunder and simplification of the

Silvermines, which the government spent €11m remediating in the 1990s, was back in the news in May 2017 as three cows were found dead of lead poisoning. A new inter-agency group involving the HSE, Department of Agriculture, Tipperary County Council, Environment Protection Agency, Teagasc, Irish Water, The Food Safety Authority and the Department of the Environment has since been set up again to address this new situation. It may be of little comfort to local farmers who find restrictions placed on their farms again and to local residents concerned about public health that Silvermines has had significant remediation already. At the same time as this old infamous contaminated site was rumbling again, Judge Richard Humphreys in the High Court was preparing his orders on Ireland’s largest illegal landfill at Whitestown in County Wicklow. The clean-up bill is now estimated at as high as €140m. The case, Brownfield Restoration Ltd versus Wicklow County Council, has been covered in previous issues of Village. Rachel Carson’s book ‘Silent Spring’ in 1962 is credited with drawing widespread attention to global environmental pollution. In the 1970s discovery of a toxic landfill in Love Canal near Niagara Falls in upstate New York became the impetus for the United States adopting a law called CERCLA (Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act) in 1980. It created a fund to address and eliminate the threat from contaminated sites all over the United States and then attempted to recover the monies from the entities that had caused the pollution. It has become known as Superfund. The Whitestown site in County Wicklow and Judge Humphreys’ order is perhaps our Love Canal moment. Do we need to create an Irish Superfund law? Judge Humphreys in his judgment last July said “a full account of this saga would be book length” and described the activities as reminiscent of 1930s Chicago which prompted the plaintiff’s barrister to refer to the modern-day TV show ‘The Sopranos’ which prominently features gangster-related waste-management control. The Whitestown quarry is roughly the size of eight rugby fields. Up to twenty two companies were listed as having hauled waste there from all over Dublin including from hospitals. Wicklow County Council dumped there until the week of its closure. Now the 80,000 tonnes of waste rests like a giant toxic teabag mixed with a million tonnes of other soils from a botched remediation effort. This ‘teabag’ sits partially in the water table which fluctuates with the seasons by up to two metres. So rainfall and the fluctuating water table create a toxic blend called leachate. The off-gassing can be equally toxic and one investigator was overcome with fumes and hospitalised in the early days of discovery. While up to 93% of the waste (primarily roadworks materials) at the site was deposited by Wicklow County Council, the description of blood-stained hospital theatre waste strewn all over the site left many queasy. Two of the early investigators on site were Donal O’Laoire and Ronnie Russell of O’Laoire Russell & Associates Limited. O’Laoire had been hired by Wicklow County Council as consultant in 2001 to come up with a plan on remediation. Both O’Laoire and Russell, who gave evidence in the case, had also been directors of Eco-Safe Systems Limited since 1999. it was listed as one of the 22 contributors to the site. Eco-Safe specialised in hospital-waste disposal & sterilisation. Dr Russell as founder and president of the Irish Decontamination Institute in 1989 (then called the Irish Association of Sterile Services Managers) had established an important network for healthcare facilities dealing with these issues. O’Laoire and Russell had also founded an environmental management and auditing firm in the 1990s. At this time certifying the compliance with environmental laws was becoming an established area of expertise leading to the ISO 14000 standards for environmental management being set in 1996. O’Laoire has published for the UN on environmental management for developing countries particularly African countries. Russell continues to be a leading research scientist at Trinity College Dublin and recently published guideline Manuals on decontamination for Saudi Arabian healthcare professionals. He is current chair of the HSE National Decontamination Advisory Group and vice chairman of An Taisce’s Environmental Education Unit as well as representing Ireland at the UN in Geneva on disarmament issues as a technical expert on biological weapons. These are arguably two of the leading and trusted influential individuals on chemical environmental issues in the State, which makes the performance at Whitestown so disappointing. The problems created by the initial waste dumping then got exasperated by a “botched remediation” plan. The judge subsequently, in his finding of facts on the Whitestown dump, states: “Mr. O’Laoire developed a proposal which he himself correctly in evidence described as corrupt whereby he and his associates (variously described as a syndicate or consortium) would make a profit from a commercial venture designed to remediate the site… clearly he was engaged in a massive conflict of interest that was actual rather than potential”. Judge Humphreys later described how the Irish EPA placed itself in a compromising situation by being a part of the Technical Working Group on the remediation plan. The EPA was effectively being gentler to the public authority than it would be to a private operator. Wicklow County Council were hoping they would not have to remove all the contaminated soil even though they were requesting and celebrating judgments in other cases (eg case against Fenton, 2002) demanding defendants do just that at other illegal dumps. Judge Humphreys now had to assess the risk the site posed, using European and Irish guidelines as well as case-law. The Irish EPA guidelines gave him a scale to calculate risk. The 2007 Code of Practice: Environmental Risk Assessment for Unregulated Waste Disposal Sites authored primarily by Margaret Keegan, of the Office of Environmental Enforcement, ironically had Michael Boland of Wicklow County Council on its technical review committee. Boland was a key witness on the botched remediation-plan analysis. The risk model used by the EPA assigned ‘points’ to the