Recent FIE Publications
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Survey of EU costs of access to justice
Register of Geoinformatics in Ireland
Site Visits to Peat Extraction in Westmeath
Industrial Peat Extraction Infringement Complaint
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FIE NEWS is the current information service mailed by Friends of the Irish Environment. In the absence of the The Irish Papers Today and the Forest Network Newsletter all subscribers are being sent this FIE NEWS. You MUST respond to our verification email sent separately after this Newsletter to receive any further mailings. This is to prevent our sending unwanted further mails to our 1,769 subscribers and to eliminate old addresses. Our website continues to be updated daily with our own news and that provided by correspondents in the Republic and Northern Ireland. Contact us to help.
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HELP FINISH THE NEW OFFICE
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| FIE'  s new offices are nearing completion, with the timber framed building now with a sod roof. But FIE can not afford to finish the interior after a grant application to The Irish Environmental Network was unsuccessful. In 2009, IEN received €1,156,000 from the 'Environment Fund', of which €400,000 was distributed as direct funding to the 32 member environmental organisations. FIE received €11,637. FIE is a non-profit company that does not charge for the advice and work it does on behalf of local communities and our environment or for any of our website services. |
ACCESS TO JUSTICE & THE PRESIDENT
| |  FIE unsuccessfully appealed to Mary MacAlesse to convene the
Council of State to consider referring the new Planning and Development
(Amendment) Act 2010 to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality.
A last minute amendments to Section 50 of the Bill removed the 'loser pays' costs of the Irish Judicial system. But legal advice
this organisation has received confirms that what the amendment does is prevent
NGOs or others from receiving their costs when litigating environmental issues, EVEN if they win. The only exceptions will require the litigant to show that
the matter is of "Public Importance" AND that there are "Special
Circumstances" AND that it is "in the Interests of Justice" to
make such an award of Costs an impossible high barrier to access to justice.
The inclusion of this
amendment to the Act will have devastating consequences for environmental
justice in Ireland, the only EU country not to have ratified the Aarhus Convention.
Read the Irish Times article | The letter and legal advice | Our survey of other EU states where challenges
cost less than 5000 euro
NEW: Aarhus Compliance Committee findings against the UK for failing to provide access to justice.
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THE UNRAVELING OF THE WATER FRAMEWORK DIRECTIVE
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|  FIE has found several proposed derogations from the Water Framework Directive which requires that EU Member States must aim to achieve good status in all waters by 2015 and
must ensure that the status does not deteriorate in any waters.
While SWAN, the Irish NGO network monitoring the WFD, is expressing concerns over issues of governance, FIE is finding that even since 2005 Ireland has been planning 'derogations'.
Documentation
discovered shows that derogations are intended for waters affected by peat extraction. Meeting
notes also show that other derogations are being sought for the Avoca area of County Wicklow. Our recently filed Access to Information on the Environment request is intended to
probe the extent of the derogations planned by the Irish authorities unknown to
the public.
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PEAT CAMPAIGN
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 FIE continues to pursue the continuing wide spread extraction of turf for industrial and commercial exploitation. Unregulated sites of over 100 hectares of well known companies like 'Westlands' and 'Harte Peat' are revealed in FIE's SITE VISIT REPORTS. FIE is challenging the discharge licenses, lack of any planning permission, IPCC licence or Environmental Impact Assessment [EIA] with the EPA, the Minister, and the European Commission - and with An Bord Pleanala & Westmeath County Council in the High Court in October.
Centering on the River Inny in County Westmeath, FIE has uncovered repeated warnings from the Fisheries Board and the National Parks and Wildlife staff of the damage from siltation. A FIE national survey showed that in fact no local authorities have any record of peat extraction in their jurisdictions because of the generous exemptions from planning control. (The '7 year rule' which gives immunity from prosecution for unauthorised activities and structures if they began more than 7 years previously will be rescinded as part of the new Planning Act on 28 September, 2010.)
UCC has competed its satellite based map of exposed peatlands of Ireland for FIE and is now preparing a county by county catalogue, showing the location and extent of exposed peatlands in every county. FIE will send this to each local authority to assist them in meeting the obligations of SI 356 of 2009, which requires peat extraction operations (and quarries) to be listed in a Register of Extractive Industries by December 31, 2010. Peat Index Page | Appeal against the EPA's password protection of the new Register of Extractive Industries
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AWARENESS CAMPAIGNS
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FIE coordinates two environmental awareness campaigns - Earth Hour and 10:10.10:10 is an ambitious international project supported by 11 Irish NGOs to unite every sector of Irish society
behind one simple idea: that by working together we can achieve a 10%
cut in Ireland's carbon emissions in 2010. Read about the travels of the ananomtronic 10:10 Polar Bears to cities around Ireland, supported by Dublin Zoo. And sign up yourselves: 10.10.10 will be an international day of celebration for the individuals and businesses who have themsleves made this commitment - when our Governments have failed to do so. And read about Earth Hour and FIE's unique role in bringing WWF's incredibly successful international campaign over the last three years. Visit the 10:10 website | Visit FIE's Earth Hour site
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GRANTS FORCE FARMER TO BURN
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|  New
restrictions on the Single Payments Scheme to farmers are contributing
to the wildfires that devastated thousands of hectares of Ireland's
countryside this spring.
FIE coordinated 19 Irish environmental groups to lobby the Minister for Agriculture, pointing out that as a result of a
recent 'Health Check' of the Single Payments Scheme made to farmers
there is now an economic incentive for farmers to burn scrub land.
While
hedgerows are protected, new rules require areas of
scrub and even any part of hedgerows growing into fields to be removed
or marked on the farmer's application and excluded from payments. Only
'utilisable areas' are eligible for payment. The farmers have been
warned that areal photography and satellite images will be used in the
inspections required by the European Commission. We have asked the
Minister to ensure the Forest Service and the Department of Agriculture
Single Payments Unit work together to provide a scheme to promote the
management of these scrub areas as scrub is an important stage in forestry development and forms up to 15% of some counties 'forested areas' in the national inventory.
Letter to the Minister | Submission to the Forest Service | Press Release | Radio Debate with the IFA [20MB]
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SPIES IN THE SKY
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|  Friends of the Irish Environment have presented EXISTING
GEO-INFORMATICS IN THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND, to Conor Lenihan, Minister for
Science, Technology, Innovation and Natural Resources and called for the
release of substantial OSI [Ordinance Survey Ireland] mapping data free for use.
The Report lists the sources in Ireland of Geoinfomatics - the acquiring,
analyzing and visualizing of spatial electronic data. It is accompanied by a
Register of contacts for these sources and includes sections on free satellite
imagery and free software.
Unfortunately the new commercial online services announce by Minister
Lenihan for the OSI will only further hold back critical economic and
environmental initiatives in one of the most rapidly evolving scientific fields
- just as the UK announce almost all unrefined UK OS mapping data is now being
made freely available on the internet (with Tim Berners Lee, the 'father' of
the internet, as consultant). English research found that while their OSI would
need a subsidy from central government to make up for the loss in revenue, this
would be outweighed by a gain of around £168m per year through the meshing up
by entrepreneurs of the raw data for mobile phones, etc.
Read the Report (with useful feedbacks from the OSI and EPA) | And read FIE's presentation to the UCC 2010 EU Law & the Environment Conference on Remote Sensing as a tool for environmental enforcement.
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| HAULBOWLINE INACTION CONTINUES | | 
The toxic legacy of Irish Steel site on Haulbowline Island remains swept by the tides and leached by rainfall less than a kilometer from Cobh in Cork Harbour two years after FIE helped expose the dangers in 'Toxic Island'.Despite of the Secretary General of
the Department of the Environment's own 2004 High Court affidavit
testifying to the continuing environmental dangers and despite the
Department's own claim that the 'surface clean up' has created a further
danger, nothing has happened. Complaints to the European Commission yielded a tactic agreement by Ireland that any further actions must be licensed, but the Government, afraid of the clean up bill, continues to prevaricate, now claiming that without an agreed end use it is not possible to know the level of work that the license must require. Since the Local Authorities initial planning grant in 1978 at least a sea retaining wall has been required and agreed again and again - but the waves continue to erode the waste as the residents petition the Government to commission a survey to determine the cause of the levels of cancer in the area, reported to be 37% higher than the national
average.
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RINGFORT DESTRUCTION
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|  FIE is calling for prosecutions to follow the recent destruction of two
ringforts in north Cork. The Heritage Service of Cork County Council has
confirmed to FIE the complete leveling of two listed ringforts by the land owner. The ringforts were located in the townland of
Knockacareagh, near Killmurray in north Cork. While the vast majority
of farmers and land owners have the greatest respect for our
archaeological heritage, often at their own expense, there remain
elements in the farming community who believe that they can destroy
these sites at will because of the wide spread historic lack of
enforcement. The local Guards refused to act unless requested by
the National Monuments Service or the Local Authority. By the time these
bodies visited the site, the destruction had been completed.
FIE's call for the
full weight of the law to be brought to bear was strongly supported in the Irish Examiner:
"Our justice system must flex its muscles in this instance and show
that society will not tolerate this kind of willful destruction. If a
person is convicted of this crime substantial fines must be imposed and
collected. It would be outrageous too if the landowner continued to
enjoy farm subsidies. We all hold the world around us in trust and this act was a terrible breach of that trust."
Letter to Minister (with maps) | Picture and maps from auctioneers site | Before and after photographs
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IRISH LIGHTS AND THE COLT ROCK
| |  FIE was called in by local residents in Castletownbere when word spread on a Sunday afternoon that the Irish Lights had arrived to cut down the Colt Rock, an historic emblem mounted on a pole at the western end of Berehaven Bay.
This emblem is a cast iconic cut-out sign of a young horse more than five feet in length, built at the turn of the century and weighing close to 100 kilos. An emblem has been mounted here since the 16th century 'taxes' imposed by the O'Sullivan Beres. A good
luck token for the fishing community, FIE tried all possible avenues, including determining that no Notice to Mariners was issued, contrary to the Irish Lights Spokesman. Unfortunately, Notices to Mariners are not established in Irish law, and the local authority refused to accept that the Colt Rock was located on land.
Irish Lights claimed sole authority over the sign and it has now been removed to their workshop and replaced with a safety beacon. While some local interests want to mount it in the town to attract tourists, the local historical society are lobbying for the return of the insignia to its old location, where it would happily co-exist with the new beacon.
See the full page Irish Examiner photograph
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SHOULD PAPER BAGS BE TAXED?
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As Washington DC becomes the latest US city to impose a
levy not only on plastic bags but on paper carrier bags as well, FIE
has written to the Minister for the Environment warning him that
Ireland will be left behind by ignoring the science which shows that
paper bags have a greater adverse impact than plastic bags for a number
of the environmental issues.
The US Capital
city follows successful legislation in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles,
and San Francisco as more than 20 bag taxes have been proposed across
American cities in the past year. The need for the extension of the
levy is particularly acute in Ireland as the successful plastic carrier
bag levy has vastly increased the use of these damaging paper carrier bags.
Read our letter to the Minister. | 'Think Tank' in the Sunday Times | And don't miss the vitriollic feedback to our website!
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FORESTRY: NO CHANGE
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|  FIE resigned from the Forestry Stewardship Council's Irish Forestry Certification Initiative after even the intervention of the Switzerland based accreditation body failed to make any headway into Irish forestry policy. With no replacement for the 1996's National Policy goal of 20,000 hectares a year for 30 years to achieve an undefined 'critical mass', forestry wallows on at 5,000 hectares a year of largely non-native trees still predominantly in the wrong place. Reforestation is now 10,000 hectares a year, repeating the mistakes of the past because of the antequated legislation.
FIE attended its first Review of the Forestry Acts in 1999 and another in 2007, when we were promised that the new legislation was virtually ready to go. It hasn't even appeared on the Oireachtas calendar. Our submission to the 2010 'Forestry Review'
argues that the impact on water quantity and quality from forestry on
peat soils has significant economic and health implications. The tax payer pays
twice - first to establish industrial forestry plantations and again to clean
up the consequent pollution entering rivers and lakes, particularly those used for drinking
water. The current political proposal to amalgamate Coillte and Bord na Mona and plant cut-over bogs with forestry to meet Koyoto targets while avoiding the need to pay grants is a cause of the greatest concern. Visit the Forestry Pages | Read the Submission |
WHAT MILLENNIUM TREE?
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| Bertie Ahern - would you trust this man?  |
10 years after Bertie Ahern bamboozled the nation into believing that every man woman and child was having a tree planted for them the pigeons have come home to roost. Costing just over €4m, the project's aim was to plant 1.2 million trees with every
house hold in the country receiving a certificate of ownership of each
tree. Natural woodland specialist Ted Cook tried to find his tree, RACK
048182 in pit 39 in Rosturra forest, on part of the old Woodford Estate
in Galway. But what he found was a lot of rotting trees and a few oaks. He
said: 'When this whole project was announced, I was thrilled. But now I
am shocked and dismayed. My tree is dead and, to be honest, the whole
plantation I saw was so disorganised that I doubt anybody else will be
able to find their tree either.' The Woodland League released an otherwise positive 2007 Audit Report by the Millennium Management Committee that supported what FIE tried to voice at the time - 'Regrettably there was no mention of the fact that (in) the process of
becoming a mature native forest, natural selection will reduce the
original number of trees planted to about a 1st of those planted.' It recommends that from now on, mention of 'Millennium Trees' should be
changed to 'Millennium Forests' as 'this would help move attention from
individual trees to the forest'. See our Forestry Index | Millennium Forest Audit
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STEPHEN DEVANEY: RIP
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|  Stephen Devaney died on 31 August, aged 62.
He is remembered by us
in FIE in particular for his contribution to Irish Environmental
Non-Governmental Organisations at national level for many years. He was very
special in his sensitivity to the built heritage and his vision of law as a
means of protecting it. Deeply committed and hard working, he was a personal
inspiration through his individual - and often difficult - quest to protect our
national heritage.
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