Introduction

When examining issues in Irish waste management, many competing tensions begin to surface. These include tensions between the policy discourse of ecological modernisation and the local narratives by which communities relate to their environment. Furthermore, tensions can be detected between the demands of international bodies such as the European Union (EU), who demand efficient and regulated waste policies, and the more economically derived focus of the Irish state. The following analysis of Irish waste management explores the dichotomies between the discourse and narrative that surrounds this contested issue.

The chapter is divided into five main sections and a conclusion. The first section examines the narratives that underpin much of the debates about communities and their environments in the Irish case. The second section outlines the concept of ecological modernisation as it has developed in governance since the late 1990s. The third examines the emergence of the Irish state's regional waste plans introduced in the 1990s. The plans were significant due to their attempt to create commodified waste pathways across a number of regions in Ireland. The fourth section analyses the millennium report on Ireland's environment (Environmental Protection Agency, 2000). The fifth section looks at the community response to these waste plans, along with the subsequent mobilisation of campaigns of resistance to the inclusion of incineration as an option for waste management in the Irish case. The chapter concludes with a discussion about issues of governmentality and waste in Ireland's regions.

The chapter also examines the urban and the rural, as there is less of a divide between these two elements in Irish society than in other European states, and domestic waste flows and salient discourses on the subject impinge on both sectors in an overlapping manner. Table 10.1, based on the discursive framing analysis in the initial research for Leonard (2005, 2006), illustrates the parameters of this contested issue by separating it into constituent frames and outcomes, be they political, cultural, social, legal, institutional, economic or scientific. Table 10.1 locates the impacts and outcomes of community mobilisations in environmental disputes involving the Irish state, multinationals and the EU.

Narratives: socioenvironmental narratives and the community

This form of rural ecocentricism can be understood through an examination of ‘rural sentiment’ (Leonard, 2006). This concept has emerged from an analysis of existing studies of local environmentalism and rural change in the Irish case.