Minister must consign toxic island to history

HAULBOWLINE Island was the site of Ireland’s only steel plant.

From a peak of 1,200 employees in 1971, ministers Ruairi Quinn and Richard Burton sold the site in 1996 to the Indian company Ispat for £1, writing off £27m in debts in return for a commitment to provide 330 jobs for five years.

The contract included £2.3m from the State to clean up and contain the extensive toxic waste dump that made up the ‘East Tip’. The required wall was never built and less than £600,000 was spent.

Instead, Ispat spewed toxic chemicals into the air, onto the ground, and into the sea for five years.

In 1996 the Navy sent its flag to Forbaith, the government industrial agency for analysis. Forbaith described the flag as “heavily contaminated with airborne particles”, with a “serious health and safety risk to persons using your premises from airborne contamination”. The analysis also found cancer-causing chromium.

Every year when the plant shut for the summer break, toxic residue was bagged and buried on the ever expanding East Tip, eventually extending 22 acres into the sea.

When the plant closed in 2001, 400 jobs were lost and debts totalled £45m. A 2004 High Court action by three ministers failed to require the liquidator to clean up the site. In 2006, it was announced the site would be developed with offices, apartments, a hotel, and a marina.

The initial surface clean-up estimates of toxic material which would have to be shipped abroad for treatment escalated rapidly, reaching 113,000 tonnes before the Government cancelled the contract. It was estimated that 350,000 tonnes remained.

In 2009, after intervention by the European Commission (and this newspaper), the Cabinet authorised Cork County Council to apply for a licence to hold hazardous waste. Only the East Tip was included.

The elephant in the room that nobody speaks about is the 30-acre site of the steel plant itself, the source of the contamination; a warren of tunnels, cellars, and collapsed drainage systems thick with hazardous waste that remain untouched to this day. This constitutes ‘waste’ and should be addressed under the EU law.

The current project director, Peter Young, had been commissioned by government as far back as 2002 to assess the contamination and had concluded that on the main site there was a high risk to humans from PCBs spills; a high risk to marine ecosystems from metals from dust; high to moderate risks to humans from wind-blown dust; and high risks to groundwater from storage spills.

At the public meeting held by the council as part of the licensing process in Cobh last month, Mr Young assured the meeting of his experience at remediation of steel works sites all over Europe. He was asked if he had ever remediated a steel works site that ignored the site of the operations itself and dealt only with the waste site. He had no reply.

Surprisingly, Mr Young told the meeting their analysis of the East Tip showed the levels of contamination were not so high as to require any further material be exported for decontamination. This suggests the contamination has now passed into the environment.

If no more material is now to be exported for decontamination, the ‘ring-fenced’ fund of €40m established for this work by the Government would easily cover the remediation of the entire 21-hectare site.

The council supports this remediation, as does the Navy, but only the environment minister can consign Cork’s ‘toxic island’ to history for once and for all.

* Tony Lowes is a director of Friends of the Irish Environment.