The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the Republic of Ireland’s environmental regulator. It is tasked with protecting and improving the environment for the people of Ireland. This involves implementing and enforcing environmental legislation, and advocating to meet Ireland’s environmental commitments. Its work includes authorising and monitoring industrial activities that might impact the environment or human health.
Industrial and waste activities
The EPA’s Office of Environmental Enforcement (OEE) ensures that large industrial and waste activities are carried out in accordance with operators’ licences. To this end, it promotes and monitors compliance, provides guidance and support, carries out inspections and sampling, and takes enforcement actions when needed. The agency also tracks emissions and reviews complaints about off-site impacts from neighbours and the local community.
The EDEN portal is the EPA’s online gateway for licensing, monitoring, reporting and digital map data.
EPA powers
Operators can be instructed by the EPA to take action when they are found to be non-compliant with their licence obligations. If the problem is complex or not addressed in a timely manner to the EPA’s satisfaction, this can escalate to a compliance investigation. Operators can then be directed to take specific corrective and preventative actions, and provide supporting evidence that the required work has been completed.
Some licensed sites find themselves placed on a list of National Priority Sites (NPS). This list is used to target enforcement on the poorest performing sites and drive improvements. Serious failings can lead to legal enforcement measures. These include prosecution of the licensee, the issue of a statutory notice, and ultimately the suspension or revocation of a licence.
NPS scores
The EPA has a scoring system that measures the environmental performance of individual licensed sites. The NPS Score, as it is called, combines various metrics arising from compliance investigations, incidents, non-compliance, and complaints. A similar performance score approach is taken to water monitoring by the EPA.
EPA and water
The EPA has wide-ranging responsibilities for protecting the environment and human health. It publishes a remedial action list of sites where Uisce Éireann (formerly Irish Water), the state-owned water utility company, needs to take corrective action to ensure the safety and security of drinking water supplies. The EPA’s annual reports on urban waste water treatment identify key areas where improvements are needed to prevent water pollution, eliminate discharges of raw sewage, meet EU treatment standards, and protect bathing waters and freshwater pearl mussels.
EPA organisation
The EPA operates independently under the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. It is led by an advisory committee headed by a director general, and is divided into five offices. Aside from the EPA’s core functions of compliance, enforcement, data analysis and advocacy, there is also an office of radiation protection and environmental monitoring to protect the public from the effects of harmful ionizing radiation.
