Green Party leader and MEP candidate for Dublin, Eamon Ryan, has called on Dublin City Council to abandon plans to build an incinerator at Poolbeg.

Mr Ryan said: "The longer this project continues the more we learn about how misconceived and badly managed it has been. Despite the European Commission's decision today on the narrow issue of State Aid, audit reports and other investigations have revealed a litany of failures of policy and administration, for example:

• No formal business case was ever made for the project

• No overall budget was ever set

• Consultants' contracts were illegally extended

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• Meetings of the project board were not minuted

• Expenditure was not tracked in detail.

"If the incinerator is built now it will be a monument to bad management. More importantly, the Council are on the verge of tying Dublin taxpayers into a decades-long contract for an incinerator that will kill incentives for recycling, and stop any efforts to reduce waste dead in their tracks," he added.

"The Council's assumptions about where the waste will come from no longer stack up. Through this deal, we will be tied in to feeding the incinerator and will have to bring waste from all over the country into the centre of Dublin to be burnt. That makes no economic, environmental or energy sense.

"Why are they not thinking of a plan to reduce that waste and nurture the companies primed to repurpose it, which would increase employment and improve our balance of trade?

"There is a real risk that Dubliners will be left footing the bill for a massive incinerator with nothing to burn. Where is the forward thinking in what the Council are proposing? We should be focusing on the cost-effective ways to make this city greener, rather than spending tens of millions of euro on the Council's white elephant."

(CD/JP)