The people of Roscommon can rest easy; it’s all been disposed of.
For most regular folk, especially in Ireland, the only exposure to the deadly compound cyanide is to hear it referenced in the movies.
Certainly, it’s not something you expect to encounter on a regular basis in the west of Ireland, let alone in such vast quantities that it could take out an entire county.
According to the Roscommon Herald, a farmer in the county recently disposed of 4kg worth of cyanide at the weekend, having kept it in his shed for 40 years.
Such an amount of cyanide, according to a chemical expert, “would have been enough to wipe out most of the county”.
No doubt to the relief of Roscommon residents, however, it was all safely disposed of in a farm hazardous waste collection organised by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Roscommon town on Saturday.
The elderly farmer who had been keeping the cyanide, who was described as “a lovely gentleman,” had used it to kill rabbits in the past and had been storing it in well-secured containers.
“That would have been a common practice,” Suzanne Dempsey, environmental officer with Roscommon County Council, is quoted as saying in the Roscommon Herald.
“The farmer had it in his shed for the past 45 years and had previously sought advice on how to dispose of it safely. The chemical expert we had there on the day said that it would have been enough to wipe out most of the county.”
“We also had a quantity of the herbicide 2,4,5-T, one of the two ingredients of Agent Orange (a heribicide) which was used in the Vietnam War,” she added.
“It was good to get these chemicals into safe hands.”
People of Roscommon: you can all breathe a sigh of relief.
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