IRELAND FACES the possibility of being fined by the European courts for violations of EU environmental law, according to the Minister for the Environment.
John Gormley was speaking at a meeting of the Irish Environmental Lawyers' Association yesterday on the role of the EU in developing Irish environmental law.
While Ireland had some advanced environmental law for the time before joining the EU, European directives had since formed the backbone of current Irish environmental law, he said.
"Sometimes the system has been slow in implementing the new, more rigorous approach required and we have to acknowledge that Ireland has, in the past, been weak in certain areas of enforcement and implementation.
"Because of that, we have found ourselves at the end of negative judgments from the European Court of Justice."
He said that we continued to have a number of open environmental infringement cases at various stages in proceedings. "Some of those are very serious cases that have been on the books for years, too many years. In a number of cases, we face the very real possibility of fines being imposed by the European courts.
"Ireland hasn't managed in the past to address all the matters arising, but I am working extremely hard to resolve these legacy issues," he said.
In particular, he said, he was now looking at the transposition into Irish law of two directives, dealing respectively with public participation in environmental decisions and environmental liability.
The Aarhus Convention seeks to ensure that citizens and their representatives can play a full and active role in maintaining and enhancing the environment, with access to environmental information, public participation and access to justice.
Environmental information was already provided for in the Access to Information on the Environment Regulations, which came into force in last May. He said he was now working on the other measures that would allow us to ratify the Aarhus Convention.
The Environmental Liability Directive gave real form and substance to the "polluter pays" principle, and Mr Gormley said his department was working on its transposition. It envisages a clear role for citizens and organisations to take action in relation to instances of environmental damage and the transposing legislation would reflect that. He said the draft instrument would be available for public consultation in the near future.