THE threat of dioxin emissions from the proposed incinerator at the Roche chemical plant at Clarecastle, Co Clare, were outlined at the first oral hearing by the Environmental Protection Agency in Ennis yesterday.
The company, formerly Syntex Ltd, has been granted an integrated pollution control licence and the proposed incinerator would cost about £12 million.
A number of objections to the draft licence, including one from the company itself, were the subject of the hearing.
Supporting the Clare Alliance Against Incineration, Dr Vyvyan Howard, senior lecturer and head of research at the foetal and infant pathology section at Liverpool University, said the pollutants that would be emitted by the incinerator would have their maximum effect on foetuses.
"The dioxins are ones we know most about but there are other compounds which we know less about which are known to be toxic," he said. The effects studied so far included the suppression of the immune system and disruption of hormones.
"We do not know the full extent of the damage that could he done or at what levels," Dr Howard said. But the US Environmental Protection Agency could not detect a level of dioxins low enough to have no effect.
"Basically, the bottom line is that you in Ireland have a clean land. If you pollute it you cannot reconstruct it. We're talking about low levels of pollution here - this plant is going to be built to modern standards - but we are talking about toxic substances which are of no use toe anybody or have no beneficial effect. Therefore anything that occurs is going to be negative, it's going to be deleterious."
Dr Howard said the most effective way for a mother to get dioxin out of her body was to lactate. That left the baby open to huge exposure to dioxin in the first six months of life.
Ms Marie Christine Claes, a former adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture in Belgium, and an authority in the European Commission fruit and vegetable market division, emphasised the need for clean food production. "For the future", she said, "if people want to survive they will need to eat healthy food or diseases will appear and spread. We must respect nature and work with it to survive. We must eliminate toxic waste and waste in general at source. Incineration is not the solution or the way forward."
Ms Tess McInerney, a housewife who lives about a mile and a half from the Roche factory, spoke on behalf of local farmers. She said that the proposed incinerator would threaten the livelihood and health of the community. The impact of incineration on agriculture was complex, involving hundreds of known and thousands of unknown chemicals, each of which had unique properties of accumulation and toxicity. "They will take decades to degrade, and in the meantime will be continually circulated throughout the environment".
Mr John Enright told the inquiry that there were 22 liquid milk suppliers, supplying one million gallons of milk to Golden Vale for immediate sale on the retail shelves. They were located in and around Ennis and Clarecastle. The area picked for the proposed incinerator included some of the best land in Co Clare.
The inquiry continues today.