The Irish Environmental Protection Agency: The Early Years

Environmentalists in the Republic of Ireland (Rai) and in Northern Ireland have often used policy differences between the two states to call attention to environmental reforms for which they are pressing. In the 1990s the traffic in these comparisons has become increasingly one-way as an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been set up in the Rol while pollution-control and licensing functions are retained in the Northern Irish Department of the Environment. In this profile we set out to describe the background to, and early experiences of, the Irish Republic's EPA.