It’s time to change the name of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

An agency that, as it says itself, permits and licences [polluting] activities should not hold itself out as a protecting body.

True, the Office of Environmental Enforcement is part of the EPA, but it ought not to be, for many reasons, not least in the light of what we read in the report of Case C-494/01, (Commission of the European Communities v Ireland) ( a case concerning 12 sample indictments of the Defendant’s breaches of EU environmental law), that the Defendant produced a letter from the EPA concerning the dumping by Limerick City Corporation [now Limerick City Council], of construction and demolition waste in protected wetlands, a letter which the court quoted as saying

…the EPA stated in a letter of 23 January 1998 that depositing of that kind amounted to recovery operations not requiring authorisation.