Sir, - One can only read Frank McDonald's report (November 28th) concerning the Government's plans to establish special industrial zones with a growing sense of dismay and despair for the democratic process in Irish planning issues.
It appears that these Industrial Sacrifice Zones are now to become officially established in order to facilitate multinationals in their attempts to overcome the perfectly legitimate, if somewhat irritating efforts of ordinary Irish people to question environmentally suspect or even downright dangerous industrial projects being sited in their neighbourhood.
The toxic legacy of industrial sacrifice zones in the US will require hundreds of billions of dollars to resolve. The sacrifice zones of Eastern Europe and the CIS will probably remain as permanent historical monuments to unaccountable governments while many similar establishments in the Third World are grim reminders of the multinational colonisation of those countries with the collusion of corrupt dictators.
Not satisfied with the gradual erosion of individual basic rights in the various Planning Acts since the Sandoz and Merrel Dow sagas of the 1980s and early 1990s, this plan to establish zones in Ireland at the behest of IDA Ireland, represents the final step in the total exclusion of citizen participation in the industrial planning process.
Not content that the Local Authorities and An Bord Pleanala have almost never refused permission to an IDA-sponsored project anyway and that the Environmental Protection Agency has never refused to issue a pollution licence, the Minister for (sic) the Environment has to be admired for his honesty in finally completing the job of removing these remaining "disincentives to inward investment".
Individual industrial projects locating in the proposed sacrifice zones will no longer have to be concerned about wishy-washy planning appeals, pathetic submissions, futile court challenges or boring objections to environmental impact studies from worried environmental groups and other little people.
Unfortunately, the Minister then clouded these "reforms" with talk of "citizens' rights to express their views" and "the non-compromising of environmental protection".
Who really takes any notice of these comments about democracy when the very same Minister is preparing to bring forward legislation to further delay local authority elections for another year (Denis Coughlan, The Irish Times, November 27th)? - Yours, etc.,
From Derry Chambers
Cork Environmental Alliance Ltd., Princes Street, Cork.