Tony Lowes

The dysfunctional Environmental Protection Agency received cogent criticisms in a review that is taking too long by Tony Lowes Unless any of you have had to witness you ageing parents suffer with runny noses, respiratory infections and coughing, streaming eyes 14 hours a day 365 days a year. Unless you have had to endure the arduous, lengthy, irritating and annoying process which we have had to endure for almost 5 years you will NEVER know the pain of dealing with an agency like the EPA which lacks the basic courtesy of replying to a registered letter which was written by my 73 year old mother in the early hours of a November night in 2009 because she could not sleep with the pungent, noxious, odours. Kerdiffstown, Co Kildare resident The Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] was established in 1993 to protect Ireland’s environment and license potentially polluting activities. The EPA is responsible to no-one. Its Board of Directors includes no non-executive Directors to represent the public or ensure good governance. While the Minister for the Environment may make Regulations and issue Guidelines, the legislation makes it clear that “Nothing in the legislation shall be construed as enabling the Minister to exercise any power or control in relation to the performance by the Agency, with respect to a particular licence, of its functions”. Any appeals against EPA activities – or lack of them – are made to the EPA. The Ombudsman is barred by statute from considering activities undertaken – or not undertaken – by the Agency. An inexpensive ‘environmental court’, common in other EU states, remains a dream. The Green Party spent its years in opposition hammering the Agency, its activities, its Directors, and its Director-General, Mary Kelly. Mary Kelly is a former Assistant Director, with responsibility for environmental policy, of the employers’ group, IBEC.  She was reappointed Director-General this year in spite of the Green Party’s opposition to the initial appointment which was said to have come following an interview process which attracted an unusually low average calibre of applicant. At the time, Trevor Sargent publicly suggested that the appointment “utterly compromised” the EPA as she was “too close to businesses”. In a telling insight into the power of the Greens in Government, it’s said that the Greens approved the reappointment because they were afraid that someone worse would otherwise be selected. Village tried for more than six weeks to interview the Director-General – but one prevarication followed another. The offer is still open. In spite of being a central plank of the 1997 Platform for Government, it took John Gormley three years to announce – in February of this year – a review of the EPA. And the review, which was intended to take three months, will soon be celebrating its first anniversary with no sign of reporting. Meanwhile, the call for public consultation elicited more than 130 submissions from members of the public and agencies as varied as the Fisheries Boards, the Gardaí, the Presentation Sisters, and the County and City Managers Association (one significance absence was the Parks and Wildlife Service). The results are an astonishing catalogue of arrogant inefficiency in a dysfunctional State agency with 340 staff (including the proud beneficiaries of 44 doctorates and 100 masters degrees) which spends more than €60 million a year overseeing the deterioration of Ireland’s environment. Endeavours to support scientific research are of course praiseworthy, but the Trinity College Dublin submission suggests that much of the EPA’s research is in fact wasted because “there seem to be few, if any, officers with environmental policy, environmental economics or environmental studies expertise and so limited engagement with the project findings and therefore a lost opportunity to feed research results into policy frameworks”. IBEC’s submission coyly suggests that “a view exists that the system is overly bureaucratic, inefficient, inflexible, and process-focused rather than outcome-oriented”. It hammers “the framing of regulations, the practices of the EPA and duplication” – identifying ‘regulatory creep’ as a stumbling block to doing business in Ireland. The Health and Safety Authority draws attention to its experience of even small procedural matters requiring referral to the EPA board, resulting in ”delays in closing out issues”. Duplication appears even at the extremes of the EPA empire, with suggestions that offices like the Mallow hydrometric office could be amalgamated into the Cork office, the Donegal office into the Monahan one, and the Castlebar office into the Galway one. In fact, a high proportion of the Irish environmental complaints addressed by the European Commission – and subsequent EU Court judgments – relate to EPA failures. The normally discreet European Commission responded to the Review, noting the “limited scope” of the Agency and the “general tendency” to seek sanctions only at the District Court level, where the fines are limited to €5000. The Commission said while it was not its role to comment in detail on funding, it would like to remind the Agency of the fact that the polluter pays principle was part of both the waste and water EU Directives. Only a quarter of the Agency’s funding is derived from licensing fees with an insignificant amount coming from convicted polluters. Dan Boyle stated (before he joined the Government): “I believe that if we had a proper environmental body, a body in which the public had confidence and in which there existed a widespread belief that our environment was being properly protected, then many of our citizens should not feel the need of having to go outside and seek international support for the type of environmental protection we should be doing ourselves”. Yet even vested interests like IBEC, who might be expected to feel threatened, or at least challenged, by the EPA consider the penalty régime imposed in the Acts to be “proportionate” and “sufficiently punitive”. IBEC reproduces the oft-repeated litany presentations: that regularly infuriates environmentalists during EPA non-compliance is controlled by a company’s concern for its reputation. The first ‘systematic’ condemnation by the European Court of a member state’s environmental protection

The history and current reality