With rising profits at Alcan, the Canadian owner of Aughinish Alumina, the Environmental Protection Agency should ignore the company's main objection to the terms of an integrated pollution control licence for the Co Limerick plant, according to local environmentalists.
The call came from the Askeaton-Ballysteen Animal Health Committee after Alcan reported an increase in first-quarter profits, up from $107 million in 1997 to $128 million this year.
The company's main objection to the proposed IPC licence no longer stands, a committee spokesman, Mr Donagh O'Grady, claimed.
Aughinish Alumina had said the conditions proposed by the EPA would jeopardise the financial viability of the plant, he noted. "Given Alcan's current high level of profitability, this excuse can now be discounted," Mr O'Grady claimed.
Almost a year after the oral hearing, the EPA had still failed to decide on the licence. The committee as a consequence lacked confidence in the agency, he said, while it seemed to it that nobody was willing to take responsibility for monitoring the plant.
"With industry in the area having spent about £20 million in improvements to their plants and this coinciding with a dramatic improvement in animal health, there will always be the strong suspicion that industry was in some way responsible," he added.
An EPA representative or a spokesman for the company was not available for comment last night.
