Benchmarking

national | environment | opinion/analysis Saturday December 10, 2005 13:53 by Sean Crudden - Cooley Environmental and Health Group sean at cooleyehg dot com Jenkinstown, Dundalk, Co Louth. 042 93 71310

"The Winds that Blow Across the Seas from Ireland..."

Arthur Morgan TD as well as Shane McEntee TD passionately expressed during the week in Drogheda, at a meeting organised by Meath Community Forum, their oppostition to incineration. But what if the incinerator at Carranstown (or the one in Cork) goes ahead?

There was an excellent meeting organised by Meath Community Forum held in The Boyne Valley Hotel on Tuesday night last 6 December 2005. The meeting was intended to deal with the waste disposal plan for the North-East Region (Meath Monaghan Louth and Cavan) but, as you might expect, a lot of the discussion centred around the planned incinerator at Carranstown near Drogheda. And, indeed, there is no need for me to rehearse here the arguments against incineration.

A key point made by a speaker from the IFA concerned the need to monitor the environment as the years go by in the event of the incinerator going into "production." Obviously to accomplish that some kind of "benchmark" needs to be established now or very soon. A doctor who spoke also underlined the importance of assessing the impact of such facilities as the proposed incinerator on the health of the human population. It seems to me that, at present, such assessments - even if carried out by reputable practitioners - are nothing more than rather speculative projections. So in the case of human health, too, there is a need for some kind of a benchmark.

Here in Cooley we have reason (we think) to be thankful for the work of The National Cancer Registry and recent research by Dr Dennis Pringle based on statistics from that source helped to dispel at least temporarily an unusually high public fear of cancer in this community. As a result of his research the installations at Sellafield seem rightly or wrongly to be less of an insidious threat today than they were perceived to be even five years ago.

Naturally there are a lot of things affecting the environment and its human denizens apart from the proposed incinerator (or Sellafield). However, from a purely defensive point of view, there is obviously a need for benchmarking, monitoring and assessment to ensure that the environment and the human race here in Ireland are not losing their elasticity and restorative powers of recovery.

So at the meeting I called for a broadening of the work of The National Cancer Registry to involve a wide range of illnesses other than cancer including, even, things like mental illness and obesity. I would also like to see - in addition to the EPA and RPII - some kind of coherent "National Environment Register" to note and record changes in the environment nationally (at the level of District Electoral Division).

You may caution that the result of this kind of work would be simply an assembly of a dense mass of impenetrable statistics. But of course the most important step in any kind of scientific process is to count, measure and record. After that there are brilliant analytical minds (like Dr Pringle) to whom such statistics would simply be meat and drink.

And I am keen on a systematic use of a photographic record. For example, who will know in 50 years time what a mental patient of today looks like?