There are ‘concerning localised issues’ with air quality, EPA says

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has today launched its annual air quality report Air Quality in Ireland 2021.

The report shows that, while air quality in Ireland is generally good and compares favourably with many of our European neighbours, there are concerning localised issues which lead to poor air quality.

While Ireland met EU legal air quality limits in 2021, it did not meet the health-based World Health Organization (WHO) air quality guidelines for a number of pollutants including: particulate matter (PM), nitrogen Dioxide (N02), sulphur dioxide (SO2) and ozone (O3) due to the burning of solid fuel in our towns and villages and traffic in our cities.

Poor air quality has a negative impact on people’s health and there are an estimated 1,300 premature deaths in Ireland per year due to particulate matter in our air.

Air monitoring results in 2021 from EPA stations across Ireland show that fine particulate matter (PM2.5), mainly from burning solid fuel in our homes, and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) mainly from road traffic, remain the main threats to good air quality.

Launching the report, Dr Micheál Lehane, Director of the EPA’s Office of Radiation Protection and Environmental Monitoring, said: ‘The EPA’s air quality monitoring carried out in 2021 has shown that Ireland met all of its EU legal requirements in 2021.

“However, we would not have met the new WHO air quality guidelines for health.

“Meeting the new WHO guidelines for air quality will be a major challenge for the country, however the report identifies a number of solutions to move towards these guideline levels’’.

In the report the EPA says that Ireland should move towards “achieving the health-based WHO air quality guidelines,” and local authorities must “must provide more resources to increase air enforcement activities.

“National investment in clean public transport is needed across the country,” the EPA says.