Construction of new forest roads which do not need planning permission is increasingly being used as a way of illegally dumping waste, participants at the Irish Rural Link conference in Portumna heard yesterday.
Mr Frank Corcoran, chairman of An Taisce, said those involved in the dumping business had discovered that it was not necessary to have planning permission to build forestry roads.
"We now have a new form of illegal dumping: linear forestry roads where material, which cannot be dumped legally elsewhere, is being dumped in forests as roads and some of this material is dangerous," he said.
Mr Corcoran said his organisation was monitoring the situation and he wanted delegates to be aware of what was happening and the potential danger such activity posed.
He warned that rural Ireland will become a target for illegal dumping of waste generated in urban areas.
Mr Corcoran was addressing delegates who represent community and rural development groups across the country.
He said there was an urgent need for proper waste disposal facilities in urban industrial sites, where disposal could take place in safe and highly controlled conditions, as in the Netherlands and New Zealand.
He warned that illegal dumping would increase in rural areas if the proper services were not provided and it was essential that these be put in place as quickly as possible.
Many of the quarries in rural Ireland were operating without planning permission and his organisation would investigate breaches of the planning laws at such quarries.
Most quarries claimed they were operating before 1963 but if activity had been interrupted, or the quarry increased to adjoining areas, planning permission was needed.
"We will be monitoring these developments," he said.
He complained that many other agencies that should be monitoring developments were no longer doing so. These included the Heritage Council, Dúchas and the Department of the Environment. The regional water authorities had also become relatively inactive since the vilification of the chief executive in the north east.
"An Taisce is frequently criticised for not lodging appeals to An Bord Pleanála until the last week of the four-week period allowed. That is simply because we are never informed of decisions until the third week of the process and if we want to object, it has to happen in that last week," he said.
Mr Corcoran was also highly critical of the Government policy on transport.
"In 1998 the policy of supporting public transport had been chosen but now the Government is clearly following a programme of supporting private transport development," he said.
This attitude breached the Amsterdam agreement which made it mandatory to favour public transport over private transport, he added.