Council waiting for EPA decisions on historic landfills in Thurles

Tipperary County Council are awaiting decisions from the Environmental Protection Agency to carry out work on historic landfills in the Thurles-Templemore Municipal District.

At last week’s district council meeting, Councillor Jim Ryan raised concerns about the Brittas and Monanearla historic landfill sites.

He said the site has been an issue for 30 years now and his understanding is that money has been put aside to deal with it.

“It is unacceptable to have dumps like this,” said Cllr Ryan. 

An official from the environmental section of Tipperary County Council said they must first get Certificates of Authorisation (CoA) from the EPA. 

He said they have applied for CoAs for both sites in 2021 and 2023. 

For the Brittas site, he expects they could be waiting up to a year.

Once they have received those certificates, they can apply to An Bord Pleanala to carry out development on the sites. 

“We have no authority to speed up that process,” said the official. 

According to Tipperary County Council, historic or closed landfills were operated by local authorities without a waste license between July 1977 and March 1997.

Those landfills now have to be licensed retrospectively by the EPA. 

That is called a CoA, which when authorised will let the council know what control and remediation measures are needed to make the landfill environmentally safe. 

According to the environmental update for the Thurles-Templemore Municipal District, the council are continuing to monitor the historic landfills in the county.

As of November 2022, contracts appointing consultants to carry out risk assessments of five historic landfills were completed.

These also include Kiltillane in Templemore.