Carlow County Council has been recognised for its environmental enforcement work by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its 2025 assessment of local authorities.
The local authority was rated excellent in all bar one of the extensive areas examined by the EPA, much to the satisfaction of Senior Executive Environment Officer Liam Carroll.
“We’re improving year on year over the last four or five years in terms of our performance,” Mr Carroll told KCLR News.
“In the environmental protection space, we are the police, so we enforce environmental legislation, but the EPA has oversight of what the local authority does and dictates to local authorities nationally in terms of where we should be allocating our resources and our efforts.
“We have national enforcement priorities, 15 areas where we have to address and to work towards every year, so whether it’s waste, enforcement, water quality, air noise and governance, and of those 15 priorities, we scored strong or excellent in 14 of them and just moderate in one, so we’re achieving 93 per cent compliance.
“We’re second only to the big hitters at Dún Laoghaire/Rathdown, Galway City, and South Dublin so it’s really pleasing to see a small local authority such as Carlow really improving and getting up there with the big players in terms of our work and our effort and this kind of recognition is great to see.”
Mr Carroll added: “There’s always room for improvement and we’d like to work on improving our figures again with 2026 in mind. We’re working on building on how we’re performing in the areas of air and noise so we’ll be concentrating our efforts in that space. But overall, I’m very, very happy with how we figured”.
During 2025, Carlow County Council conducted 3,326 waste inspections, representing a 34 per cent increase on 2024. In addition, there were 729 waste water inspections and 152 farm inspections. Meanwhile, 130 litter fines have been issued up to the end of September, representing a significant increase on the 57 issued for the entirety of 2024.
Some 234 littering and illegal dumping incidents were recorded last year, with the bring banks at Tullow (99) and Hacketstown (65) proving the most ‘popular’ sites for illegal dumpers.
When it came to its anti-dumping initiative, 77 tonnes of waste were removed by the Council across the county last year, with a further 133 tonnes removed since the start of this year.
Liam Carroll spoke to KCLR’s Dermot Keyes about the positive progress the Council has made in terms of waste enforcement over the past two years.
