Irish Digest

When he heard the news, he got paint and cloth out and composed the banner. The message done he got in his car and drove into Limerick city and onto the Ennis Road in County Clare. Less than an hour after leaving his farm in East Limerick the man, whose herd of cows had been killed by toxic pollution, was stood outside the gates of Syntex’s chemical factory in Clarecastle with a banner letting everyone who cared to know what he thought about the Irish Environmental Protection Agency. “How can you license these people when you don’t even know what killed my cattle?”

“I was overwhelmed”, said one person who has been fighting Syntex’s plans to build a toxic waste incinerator for the best part of a year, “that a sixty year old man whose livelihood had been destroyed can do something like this. We got up there to join him along with a rake of children”. That morning the EPA had turned down the community’s appeal against the incinerator, effectively dismissing their fears about the health effects from toxic pollution. “We’re being poisoned and the state doesn’t care.”

Contact Ballyhoura Talamh Glas: 00 353 62 48668.