Local authorities have not prioritised enforcement action to prevent water, air, and noise pollution to protect the environment, with poor inspection rates and follow-up actions, a watchdog has found.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said that while the prioritisation of resources towards waste activities delivered improvements and positive environmental outcomes, there were areas that councils around the country needed to improve on.
“The effective enforcement of environmental law is essential to identify polluters and noncompliant operators, and to hold them to account,” the EPA’s director of environmental enforcement Dr Tom Ryan said.
“Local authority leadership is critical in delivering better environmental outcomes through the prioritisation of environmental enforcement and the appropriate allocation of resources.”
Its latest report, published today, shows that across the 31 local authorities last year, 547 staff handled 70,000 environmental complaints.
They also carried out 212,000 environmental inspections, undertook 17,000 enforcement actions, and initiated 470 prosecutions.
Rating each local authority across a range of categories, the EPA ranked eight of them as strong or excellent in 17 of more the 20 national enforcement priorities. These were Cork County, Kildare, Meath, Dublin City, Monaghan, Carlow, Donegal and Wicklow County Councils.
Kildare County Council was the only one with the top ranks across all 20 priorities for the second year running.
Six local authorities that failed to achieve the high score in 10 or more were Westmeath, Galway City, Waterford, Wexford, Sligo and Kilkenny County Councils.
Looking at water enforcement, the EPA said agriculture continues to have a significant impact on water quality, resulting in excess levels of the likes of nitrogen and phosphorous entering our waterways.
“While the number of local authority farm inspections increased by 9% to 1,137 in 2023, the number is still too low,” EPA’s programme manager Patrick Byrne said, urging local authorities to use all the powers available for enforcement to improve water quality.
The EPA said that little progress was made by local authorities in implementing noise action plans last year while they also assigned a much lower level of resources to air enforcement.
In terms of waste, it said that local authorities must target areas with low use of the three-bin service were provided to maximise waste recovery.
One example it highlighted was a process from Donegal County Council to ensure more households were provided with a three-bin service of brown, black and green bins.
At the end of 2018, only around 1,600 households in Donegal had the three-bins.
“From this data Donegal County Council identified a high number of the households refusing the 3-bin service,” it said.
“By the end of 2023, through the engagement with the waste collectors, awareness raising with households and enforcement on unauthorised activities over 17,500 households in Donegal were provided with a 3-bin service.”
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