Oireachtas committee wants inquiry into alleged pollution of Castlecomer farm

An Oireachtas committee has been told it cannot conduct an inquiry into the alleged pollution of a Co Kilkenny farm by a now-closed brick factory that was part of the CRH group.

The Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine is to meet in a private session on Monday to discuss its options following the receipt of legal advice that it does not have the power to conduct an inquiry. Members of the committee believe some type of State inquiry is required.

“The committee would like to go forward with the matter, but after getting legal advice, we are not sure where we can go with it,” said the committee chairman, deputy Jackie Cahill of Fianna Fáil. “The members would like to proceed and if we could do so within our powers, we would.”

In November the committee invited Dan Brennan, a farmer from Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny, to appear before it to outline his claim that serious problems on his farm over an extended period were due to emissions from the nearby Ormonde Brick factory.

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Over a 30-year period, from 1990, Mr Brennan’s cows were producing between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of the amount of milk that would be expected, he told the committee. “Our cattle were extremely stunted and used to have a high mortality rate.”

He said experiments conducted at the time, including feeding tests involving animals from his farm being moved to other locations and animals from other locations being moved to his farm, supported his view that the problems on his farm were due to pollution.

The situation changed completely after the brick factory closed in 2008, he said. “The environment on our farm has fully recovered.”

The former editor of the Farmers’ Journal, Matt Dempsey, told the committee about visiting the farm in 2006 to write an article about it.

“I had never seen anything like what was there in my life. The cattle were stunted, with two-year-old cattle looking like they were six months old, except that they had very swollen, artificially large heads compared to the rest of their body.”

A farmer himself, Mr Dempsey said he was quite happy that the problem was not due to Mr Brennan’s farming practices. He sought permission to return to the farm in 2021, as he was curious as to whether it had changed.

“The farm had completely recovered,” he told the committee. “The hedges had regrown and milk yields were back to normal ... The operation of the farm had not changed particularly but the performance of the animals and the state of the vegetation was dramatically different. The conclusion I came to, even though it is not my area of competence, was that some external circumstance had changed very fundamentally that allowed the farm to perform as one would expect a well-run Kilkenny farm to perform.”

Two vets also gave evidence to the committee in support of Mr Brennan. One, Jim Crilly, who formerly worked for Teagasc and was part of an investigation conducted by the State agricultural agency in 2004, told the committee of his view that the source of the problem was emissions from the brick factory, which was at the bottom of a valley below Mr Brennan’s land. He criticised the performance of State entities in relation to the monitoring of the factory and the investigations held into the poor performance of Mr Brennan’s stock. An effort to have the matter investigated at EU level had come to a sudden end in 2014 for reasons that were unclear, he said.

A committee of the European Parliament produced a report in 2007 after visiting the farm in which it expressed the view that the factory was the “probable” cause of Mr Brennan’s problems.

“It is not only the cattle which have been affected as the delegation was able to clearly see the impact of toxicity on the foliage and trees in the hedgerows where shrivelled branches and dead leaves areas were quite visible, next to areas of healthy plant growth,” the report said. A subsequent proposed scientific review never went ahead and the case was returned to the Irish authorities in 2014.

Mr Crilly said that one of the alleged pollutants from the factory, cadmium, accumulates in the kidneys in humans. “We have not gone into it here because we want to respect the privacy of Mr Brennan and his family, but this area needs to be addressed as well.”

Mr Brennan told the committee that in 2008 his vets were told that evidence of cadmium poisoning had been found in the blood of his cattle, but that a few months later he was told the blood had become contaminated during the tests in the laboratory.

The farmer’s case was raised in the Dáil in December by the Sinn Féin TD for Carlow-Kilkenny, Kathleen Funchion. She asked the Minister for Agriculture, Charlie McConalogue, if he would commit to the holding of a public inquiry into the alleged pollution.

However, the minister said the matter had already been the subject of thorough assessment and investigation. “There is not any proposal to reopen this matter”, he said.

An inter-agency group set up in 2004 had included his department, the EPA, Teagasc, the HSE and Kilkenny County Council, the minister said. There had been two separate investigations and a review, leading to a final report from the inter-agency group in 2010, he said. He did not summarise the outcome of the investigations or the review.

Ms Funchion said the details of the case reminded her of the movie Erin Brockovich. Mr Brennan had been told “time and time again” by the State that he was “basically not up to standard as a farmer”, but what had happened since the factory closed supported his case that pollution was the source of his difficulties, she said.

The minister said he would review any submission he received from the committee arising from its consideration of the matter.

The August 2010 inter-agency review concluded that extensive environmental and animal investigations had found no evidence indicating environmental pollution was the cause of the problems on Mr Brennan’s farm.

“There was no evidence that cadmium or fluoride were involved with the ill health of animals on the ... farm,” the report said.

The problems with the livestock were likely to be “multifactorial in origin”, it said, noting how investigations by the department’s veterinary laboratory up to 2006 had identified common diseases that might explain the problems with the animals. No evidence of toxicity was found, it said.

Monitoring by the Environmental Protection Agency had found elevated levels of fluoride emissions but not to levels “considered to be causing a significant environmental impact.”

Inquiries by the HSE, the report said, “did not identify any increase in human illness or unusual patterns of human illness in the area.”

A spokesman for Roadstone, which is part of CRH plc, said it was “fully satisfied that Ormonde Brick Ltd, which ceased operations in 2008, had no liability in respect of the historic allegations relating to the Brennan farm”.