“I was lying in my hospital bed and I just kept thinking, ‘God, please don’t let me die. I want to live to see the dump gone,’” says resident Annette Flanagan.
“Well done, Annette! Fair play,” a woman passing by with her child calls out. “We’re delighted for you!”
On the other side of the road in Belcamp Gardens in Priorswood, Annette Flanagan waves back, smiling contently.
Then Flanagan turns around to watch the clean-up crew that she has been waiting on for a decade.
Engines and hydraulic excavator arms rattle as they scrape off earth and concrete and the sound reverberates around the sunny green space at the end of Moatview Court and Belcamp Gardens in this north Dublin suburb.
It’s Tuesday morning and the machines are clearing paths to allow access in and out of the site.
The major clean-up of this longstanding, massive, industrial-sized illegal dump and landfill has begun.
Flanagan campaigned for many years for Dublin City Council to do something about the mounds of construction debris and residential waste on this piece of land.
She says it was a struggle to even find out who owned the land to begin with. But then she discovered the owner was the council.
Standing in her front garden, and looking across the green, on the far side, Flanagan can see a long, tall hill.
Brightly coated in thick green and yellow weeds, it looks like it’s always been there. But it hasn’t, Flanagan says.
“We used to be able to see the road from here until a few years ago, when that mound kept getting bigger,” she says.
The artificial hill is in fact an illegal landfill. Around it, large quantities of household rubbish are strewn across the field.
But, at last, there is action, says Flanagan.
She asks one of the clean-up crew, working for the Breffni Group, how long a job they were facing. “Could be six months,” he says.
Back in 2019, the council and the EPA already knew about the dump and were talking about it.
“This is not what we call illegal dumping. This is highly commercial, organised, industrial and garden waste that has been going on for a number of years,” then Sinn Féin Councillor Larry O’Toole said at the time.
The council did some work to remove it, but the dump reappeared and kept growing.
“It’s not like it just went up overnight, it’s built and built for years,” says Elaine Sherlock, a local resident out for a walk on Tuesday.
She is pushing her five-month-old baby girl in a stroller, the canvas lid keeping her out of the hot, late-April sun.
“When I look out my bedroom window, I see that hill. I’m tired of it,” Sherlock says.
She tells Flanagan how relieved she is that her child will never see the dump. She will grow up not knowing it was ever there, Sherlock hopes.
Flanagan herself has raised six children in the house she still lives in, all now grown. For her, the fight was for the other children living nearby.
She says her mission was always to see her six children well-educated and living happy lives, which she says they now are.
However, while she is close with her children, some are wary of bringing their own young kids back to where they grew up.
“They don’t want their own children to see what’s happened to the place,” she says. “There is also a lot of drug dealing here, out in the open. Between that and the dumping, I go visit them instead.”
In March 2020, a spokesperson for Dublin City Council had said that cleaning up the site was “one of a number of priority capital projects for the year 2020”.
Indeed, “the scale of the problem and the health risks involved require immediate action,” said the minutes of a meeting in June 2020 of government officials from the council, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others, which mention a plan to act within months.
In 2022, Owen Keegan, who was then chief executive of Dublin City Council, sent out a €10 million plan for the site to councillors, to clear the waste and build a wall along one side of the site to deter dumping.
In April 2023, council officials were saying they hoped work would start in the autumn of that year. Now they have finally begun.
But, for Flanagan, the clearing of the dump and landfill is only one part of the process. She hopes the large space will be used to provide community amenities – and doesn’t fall back into neglect.
Local kids play football outside her garden in the evenings. But they won’t go down to where the waste sits, rotting. Flanagan wants to see them able to use the whole green space, carefree.
“We have asked for a pitch for the kids. They are absolutely football mad around here. It’s all they want to do, and they should be encouraged. The dealers know to stay well clear of the local children – they’ve been told,” she says.
Another amenity residents hope will replace the dump is a sensory garden, for local people with autism. Also, allotments for the elderly to grow vegetables.
The council told Flanagan there is a €9 million budget for the work, she says. When she asked about the other amenities, she was told that they have to wait for planning permission.
“I told them they’d better start asking for the permission now, so. It’s four years since they even started telling me the dump and landfill would be sorted. Four years. We’re not waiting again,” she says.
Flanagan says she has watched time after time as all sorts of vehicles, including bikes, vans and taxis, casually pull up to throw bags of waste onto the green.
However, she chose to focus her frustrations at Dublin City Council.
“That’s who I blame, really. For years I told them what was happening, that it was getting worse, that it was turning into a landfill. I told them ‘Youse are letting this happen,’” Flanagan says.
Flanagan adds that she is only concerned now with moving forward. “We are where we are,” she says. “It’s what’s next that matters.”
She has her eyes optimistically on the future, perhaps because that very future was in doubt recently.
Three years ago, she suffered an aneurysm and was left in intensive care. It happened just two or three days after a community forum meeting, where she made her frustrations clear to council officials.
“I lost the plot with the board that time. I was just so angry at that point with them. Next thing, I’m in hospital with a brain bleed,” she says.
But even from her hospital bed, she says she was writing texts to contacts in the council.
“I was lying in my hospital bed and I just kept thinking, ‘Please don’t let me die, I want to live to see the dump gone,’” Flanagan says.
While, at times, Flanagan felt alone in her fight to reclaim the green space where she lives, she pays tribute to people who joined her along the way.
Many of whom have since died, she says. “So many of our great neighbours, for 40 years, have died in the last few years, mostly from cancer,” she says.
“My friend Monica, we were fighting and fighting to get rid of that landfill. She was one of my best pals and neighbours, and now she’s gone. Ellen, a few doors down, too,” Flanagan says.
Local residents have said for years they feared the health impacts of living next to the massive unregulated dump, with who-knows-what inside it.
Engineers who examined the site in 2020 found evidence of asbestos dumped there, and of burning.
Although, their tests and analysis found that none of the pollutants in the dump presented a significant human health risk, according to their report.
A local law centre in Dublin 17, Community Law & Mediation, also joined Flanagan in her campaign, offering free legal support.
They’ve “been working with residents, many of whom have been campaigning for years, to put pressure on Dublin City Council to take action on the site, which has become a serious health and environmental hazard”, a centre spokesperson said.
It’s great that the cleanup has finally started, but the centre remains “prepared to take further action if necessary to ensure that the site is fully and safely cleared and that the community's rights are protected”, the spokesperson said.
As Flanagan looks back over towards the work crew in their excavators, she says she can’t quite believe her eyes.
“I don’t even know what way to say it,” she says. “We were so long fighting and fighting, and they didn’t give two shits about us. It’s just satisfaction.”
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
“I would have some concerns that the waste-to-energy incinerator plans really just lock us into kind of unsustainable systems.”
Concerns have been raised about data protection, but an expert says the council can collate this data if it shows that it is necessary and proportionate.
“We can then follow that up with cold calling, calling at houses, calling at properties and then we can then prosecute.”
For years, an operator has paid to collect used clothes. Going forward, the council will have to pay for the service, a spokesperson said.
