Having worked for many years on various matters with Mr. Goulding, I appreciate that everything he says is accurate. With regard to Passage West, the WIF got involved when nobody knew anything about it and stopped everything. That has now been resolved by engineering practices within the plant. I put a question on this matter last year to the Cork city manager but nobody knew of any other such locations. Since then, the major south docks plan has been brought forward. There was a problem about the possible contamination of soil in this area but nobody mentioned this until I put a question on it. The Secretary General was not aware of it but I got a reply from him last week. However, the 31 Cork Corporation members do not know about it. The planners might now be on board.
The development is going ahead. A new organisation has been set up to plan for the area from Páirc Uí Chaoimh to the north jetty. It is so big, it is hard to visualise it but it is effectively a new town. However, right in the middle there is the affected zone on Centre Park Road. I am concerned that people are just ploughing on like this. These are just the two matters in which I have been involved. I appreciate that we are retrospectively applying legislation from Europe but I am not happy that we are moving quickly enough. We seem to be waiting until somebody applies for permission to build a multimillion pound development before telling them they are caught under the Seveso II directive.
I only got this notification last Wednesday or Thursday. As a member of Cork Corporation, I should have been aware of it previously. This could jeopardise a development for which at least £100,000 has already been spent just drawing up the plan and working with international consultants. The notification was never mentioned. I think I asked the consultants about Seveso about six months ago and nobody was aware of any impediment or difficulty. There is a breakdown somewhere. People should at least get a flagging about these sites even if details followed later. We should publish the list. They are covered by legislation and we have nothing to hide.
You should be up front and say there are 65 of these locations and that you are evaluating how far these hazardous lines will go, whether it is 100 metres or a kilometre. We should be moving more speedily on this. I am afraid we will lose development. There will not always be plenty of jobs being created and we could lose some of them through messing things up. We lost Passage West. There is a massive problem there because of the two year delay. The designation was extended but I am worried that the HSA might be working in isolation on this. It is telling the planners the position but it should publish a list of the sites and, if it has to be upgraded or further investigated, so be it. However, it will flag difficulty for potential developments. It did not happen in the south docks development or in Passage West until after the event.
Do you accept my point? I am sorry for being so long winded about it, Chairman, but it is a serious issue.