Council seeks to borrow more than €50m for incinerator site

DUBLIN CITY Council has said it needs to borrow more than €50 million to complete the purchase of the site of the controversial Poolbeg incinerator.

However, the move is likely to be blocked by councillors whose permission is needed before the council can approach lending institutions.

In a report to be put to councillors tonight, the council is seeking approval to borrow €50.3 million for site costs and an additional €10.8 million to develop a district heating system using power from the incinerator.

The council has already spent more than €120 million buying the site for the proposed plant. The contract with the US developers of the incinerator, Covanta, is under review until next November, but the council has said it is confident the project will be back up and running by the end of this year.

Councillors from all parties representing the southeast area of the city said yesterday they would be voting against the request for borrowing and expected the support of their party colleagues.

Fine Gael councillor Paddy McCartan said he was “shocked” by the request and had understood that the purchase of the site had been completed.

“I’m particularly shocked by the scale of what’s still required to complete the purchase. There’s no way I could support the request for this extra borrowing,” he said.

Cllr McCartan said he did not understand why the council was seeking to borrow money while the future of the project was still undecided. He said he wanted a meeting between councillors and Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan in relation to the future of the plant. “We need more national direction on a major issue like this,” he said.

Mr Hogan has said he will not be intervening to prevent the incinerator going ahead.

Deputy Lord Mayor Maria Parodi (Lab) said she remained opposed to the incinerator and would block any further spending in relation to it.

“I am completely against the approval of any further borrowing for this incinerator which is an outdated method of waste management which has already cost an enormous amount of money,” she said. The council should not be getting into further debt in relation to the project, particularly when it remained “in limbo”, she added.

“The council can still back away from this and at the very least voting down the borrowing request will be an interim roadblock to the project going ahead.”

Fianna Fáil councillor Jim O’Callaghan said his party colleagues would be voting against the borrowing and he hoped Fine Gael and Labour councillors would do the same.

“This is an unnecessary level of expenditure that we are being asked to approve,” he said.

The council said it and the other Dublin local authorities are responsible for providing the operator with a site for the facility. It said that it wanted to borrow the money rather than pay for the Poolbeg project out of available funds and that it intended to start borrowing this year.