 FIE has made three major submissions to recent Government consultations. On waste, the consultation document “Towards a new National Waste Policy Discussion Document” ignored more than three years of work. The “International Review of Waste Management Policy”, published in 2009 with 65 Annexes, the largest waste policy study ever undertaken in Ireland, at significant cost to the taxpayer, by an international consultancy was effectively ignored in the consultation document. Two further submissions relate to the C-66/06 Judgment of the European Court of Justice about activities in the countryside that damage the environment. The Government has moved controls for assessment of hedgerows, archaeological monuments and land use changes from the Department of the Environment to the Department of Agriculture, who do not have the skills for this work and who have production targets to meet that conflict with environmental protection. The Department of the Environment has kept the protection of wetlands under its own control – and that of peat extraction – but has left a threshold for wetland assessments that effectively deregulates a significant proportion of wetlands in Ireland, including most ponds, springs, streams, dune slacks and wet woodland relics and could significantly undermine the conservation function of larger wetlands. The failure to undertake a Regulatory Impact Analysis is a central concern of FIE's submission as this would have highlighted the problems. Waste policy consultation | New EIA Regulations C-66/06 Agriculture | New EIA Regulations C-66/06 Environment // Read More // |