The weekend admission by the British authorities that radioactive waste was dumped secretly in the Irish Sea in the 1950s and 1960s may yet prove to be another welcome sign of the greater transparency of the Blair administration. But the decidedly low-key manner of the revelation was not reassuring.
Confirmation that the material, in heavy metal drums encased in concrete, had been dropped into the Beaufort Dyke came from the Scottish Office. Current levels of radioactivity were being monitored by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), a spokesman said, but they were so low they could not be measured. Later, a Downing Street spokesman said that correspondence from the 1950s "had just come to light". It "seems to show", he said, that "a few tonnes of low-to-intermediate contaminated waste" were dumped. Prior to this "coming to light", successive governments had been unaware, and so forth.
Was the British government of the time aware of the dumping? Did it approve? Did its agencies participate? Is it really credible that British ministers - who have denied for 13 years, inside and outside the House of Commons, the dumping in the Dyke of any radioactive waste were in the dark? It is to be hoped that the parliamentary answer promised for later this week will address these questions.
The new Green Party TD, Mr John Gormley, commented that the revelations confirmed the worst Irish fears about the secrecy of nuclear dumping. "Since 1984 there have been false statements made to the British parliament based on a report that all Britain's radioactive waste was disposed of in the mid-Atlantic," he said. "Therefore, how confident can we be that this check of radiation levels by the MAFF can be believed?"
Radioactive contamination of the Irish Sea from the THORP nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield is probably the greatest environmental threat faced by Ireland. Earlier this year, the country breathed a communal sigh of relief when the British government rejected Nirex's plans for an undersea nuclear waste dump at Sellafield. But Nirex, having invested hundreds of millions of pounds and spent many years planning its dream dump, may try again. And in the three months since the plan was rejected there have been several new causes for alarm. Canadian researchers have published data showing that discharges from Sellafield are having a bigger effect on Arctic seas than the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. British Nuclear Fuels, the company which operates Sellafield, has confirmed that it is transporting nuclear products to customers in Switzerland and Germany by air. The company has applied for a pollution licence to change permitted emission levels from Sellafield; and it has admitted that concentrations of the radioactive element Technetium 99 in lobsters off the Cumbrian coast have risen to unprecedented levels - a finding which drew expressions of concern from the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland.
Ireland's long-term aim - however difficult to achieve - must be the closure of Sellafield. It may well be one of the better-run reprocessing plants in the world but it constitutes, nevertheless, an unacceptable risk to populations on both sides of the Irish sea. Assurances on safety measures and discharge levels count for very little when it transpires that 13 years of denials about waste dumping were false.