GDPR has made it harder to catch illegal dumpers, Eamon Ryan says

Illegal dumping at Nash's Boreen on Cork's northside.

Protecting the rights of individual's privacy and data has led to difficulties in tackling the scourge of illegal dumping, with CCTV proving a real stumbling block, Environment Minister Eamon Ryan has said.

Mr Ryan was speaking in response to senator Mark Wall, who claimed that illegal dumping could be costing the Republic's 31 local authorities a combined €90m per year to tackle.

Mr Wall said that if the €3m per year being spent on tackling dumping by his own local authority in Kildare, with up to 50 incidents weekly, was replicated around the country, it was reasonable to extrapolate that the cost overall to the country was €90m. 

Such wanton dumping would lead to Ireland's natural beauty "disappearing under mountains of discarded fridges, sofas, tyres and household rubbish".

Illegal dumping in the Culliagh area of Strokestown, Co. Roscommon.

It was second only to the Covid-19 crisis at the moment when it came to dominating the work of local representatives in all corners of the country, Mr Wall claimed.

The environment minister said that the net trend in illegal dumping was actually going in the right direction in recent years.

"Certainly, the level of large-scale illegal dumping is being significantly reduced in Ireland, relative to that seen in the late 1990s and early 2000s," Mr Ryan said.

Increased funding in recent years has beefed up enforcement personnel, he said, with the removal of over 10,000 tonnes of illegally dumped waste from the landscape since 2017.

However, data protection was increasingly complicating the issue, he said.

Louth County Council says there has been a 25% increase in illegal dumping such as this near Drogheda.

"I've seen it in my own constituency, I'm involved with groups that do cleanups of the River Dodder, and one of the most frustrating things we see further up the river is where there is significant illegal dumping happening. 

"The councils often put in CCTV cameras but actually, the frustration then is that it has proven very difficult for the local authorities to apply punitive measures. Part of that is the difficulty they have around CCTV and how the courts and others view that data.

"This is something we have to get right. There is a balance. We don't want to go down the route where our every action is monitored and traced using CCTV camera operations. There is a right to privacy and a right to anonymity.

Meath county council is to spend €110,000 across 10 projects tackling illegal dumping.

"But that right cannot protect against really blatant illegal activity. I don't have the direct answer as to how we apply the GDPR. I will ask my officials to look into further detail as to how we get that right as part of the range of measures we need."

Article 4 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) defines personal data as any information related to an ‘identified or identifiable natural person’. 

CCTV images can be regarded as personal data and data protection law will apply if the people can be identified.