FRIENDS OF the Irish Environment (FIE) have filed a “request for action” with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the discovery of potentially cancer-causing waste at Haulbowline Island, Cork.
They made the request under the European Environmental Liability Directive which gives NGOs the right to formally seek action where there is damage or a threat of environmental damage.
In its application, FIE cites the interim report on “quantifying surface waste” at the former steel plant on Haulbowline Island dated May 8th, 2008.
This report says that after the fifth day of work at the site environmental consultants NRGE Ltd said they felt obliged to make an interim report.
“It is of considerable concern to us that there is significant levels of hydrocarbon contaminated mud under the constant influence of tidal movements and percolating rain water which we deem necessitating emergency treatment immediately,” the report stated.
A spokesman for FIE said a series of e-mails showed that both the EPA and Cork County Council had been forwarded copies of the report the following day.
He said Cork County Council claimed “cabinet confidentiality” for not releasing relevant records to FIE, but the report was included in documentation released by the EPA and published on the Friends website.
“We have to ask if the Minister for the Environment was informed of this report, given his continuing insistence that there is ‘no evidence of any immediate threat to human health or the environment’,” the FIE spokesman said.
Meanwhile, solicitor Gerard Kean, who met some 30 workers in Cork who had been involved in the clean-up work on the site before it was stopped, said he would listen and then advise them.
