Residents decry port plans as unfair and unconstitutional

ENOUGH is enough, residents fighting plans for a €226 million container port in Cork harbour said yesterday.

Representatives of Ringskiddy Residents Association, which represents people living in one of the country’s most heavily industrialised zones, told An Bord Pleanála they are fighting four such large infrastructure projects proceeding under the state’s Strategic Infrastructure Bill process. They are: the Port of Cork project; a sewage treatment plant for the entire lower harbour; a second incinerator; and the proposed upgrade of the N28.

They described the process as unfair and unconstitutional — ordinary citizens in a David versus Goliath situation. Association chairman Graham Brennan and vice chairman Sean Forde told day seven of An Bord Pleanála’s oral hearing into the port project that people feel as if they are being treated with contempt.

Mr Forde said the association spent €157,000 fighting the first Indaver incinerator project — now the subject of High Court appeal.

“We do not have the resources to fight this port project in the way we would like to,” he said. “We have four applications under the strategic planning bill. How are we expected to put an end to this? All our efforts are going into this case.” He also said the town has constant problems with existing Port of Cork operations at Ringaskiddy.

Mr Brennan called on the port to withdraw their application until outstanding problems such as noise from ship generators and dust from loading procedures are resolved. Association secretary Audrey Hogan said her small community has given more than any other to the common good but has got little back in return. “The county council must be collecting huge rates from industry in the area. We must be one of the richest peninsulas in the country. But we can’t get a pedestrian crossing or a playground,” she said. Quoting Eleanor Roosevelt, a driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, she said: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.

“Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.

“Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination.

“Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.” Ms Hogan then asked hearing chairman Paul Caprani to “remember the little people, remember the people of Ringaskiddy” when making his decision.