THE CONTRACTOR tasked with cleaning up the illegal dump at Ellis’s Yard hopes to be finished by the end of this week.

It comes as City Hall officials moved to identify the dumping culprits.

Cork City Council workers visited the site yesterday and removed a number of rubbish bags which they will go through to find clues as to the identity of dumpers.

Any addressed correspondence will be used to issue court proceedings against fly-tippers at the site, which has cost the council €53,000 to clean up. The local authority hopes to recoup some of this from the Department of the Environment but has paid out almost €200,000 in the last decade to battle dumping at the yard.

Hilary Loftus, of demolition and recycling company Loftus of Cork, said he has never seen anything like the level of rubbish at the Ballyvolane site. Extra workers were drafted in to deal with the clean-up.

“We’ve cleaned the top section near the road. All the centre of it is clear and we are working around the edges of the site now. We have experts in cleaning up the asbestos. A few days should see us out now,” he told The Echo.

“We had guys on other jobs but we drafted them in and we got extra trailers and it’s worked quite well. We’re happy with our progress.

“We’ve had seven to ten men on the site since we began. It’s all domestic waste we have found. People have just been coming along and throwing their rubbish over the fence.

“City Hall officials have been up to the site and they have taken away a lot of plastic bags for investigation purposes.

“The bulk of stuff is exposed so we have just taken that away and that has all gone up to Country Clean [in Churchfield].

“The asbestos goes to Dublin and then it will go to Germany. It will be placed in mines and entombed underground.

“I have never seen anything quite like the scale of dumping at Ellis’s Yard,” he added.

Some 200,000kg of domestic and commercial rubbish will have been removed from the site once the operation has been completed. Steel recovered from the yard will be sent to Cork Metal.

Over 4,500kg of asbestos was found at the site.

Representatives from the Department of the Environment have been on site to assess the level of dumping, while City Hall is planning to erect perimeter fencing. Some security cameras have already been installed.

The Traveller Visibility Group has called for part of the land, which is already zoned by Cork City Council for Traveller accommodation, to be used by families from the adjacent Spring Lane halting site, which is overcrowded.