No harm, I hear you say.

Saves paying that local authority charge on the wheelie.

What you may not know, as you shrug your tolerant shoulders, is that, whenever headthe-ball up the road does his recurrent debris-immolation ritual, he ensures that your shoulders get a light dusting of dioxins.

A kind of deadly dandruff, dioxins are.

Carcinogenic. When those dioxins droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, what they deliver is cancer. If the wind is in the wrong direction, they will also land, in copious if invisible amounts, on the grass noshed on by local cows, travel through their innumerable stomachs and thereby latch themselves onto a link in the food chain.

The curious thing is that when the word 'dioxin' is uttered, nobody associates it with their familiar backyard bonfire. Instead, the term tends to be associated with incinerators and with the smoke-stacks of chemical manufacturers. That's because the world first encountered the dangers of dioxins following an accident at a chemical plant in Italy. Those in Seveso got a free dose of carcinogens, but also suffered from a grievous skin affliction called chloracne. The photographs of children with pitted faces imprinted on the minds of a generation the notion that dioxins are associated with uncontrolled industrial processes or incineration.

But according to a report . . . Focus on Environmental Enforcement 2004-2005 . . . out this week from the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Enforcement (hereinafter known as OEE), the real danger is posed by your weekend parish pyromaniac.

The report effectively tells the story of improvement, of industry . . . multinational and indigenous . . . behaving itself better, in environmental terms. One of the reasons is the creation of a network of other related bodies, working in concert. Or, in some cases, other, apparently unrelated bodies. One of the members of the Environmental Enforcement Network or EEN, is the Criminal Assets Bureau. CAB might not seem to have much of a role in protecting the environment, but it does. Particularly when it comes to doing away with illegal dumps.

'The man in the van' who stashes refuse in illegal dumps makes a lot of money in the process. Involvement in the environmental network means that, when he's located, CAB takes his ill-gotten gains.

Too often, when state-sponsored bodies like the EPA produce reports, those reports carry an introduction from the minister, who also appears at the launch, all the better to get his or her picture in the papers and on the TV news. Interestingly, in this instance, Dick Roche was nowhere to be seen. Nor did he provide an intro of encouraging blandness on the theme of "A lot done, a lot more to do."

Either the EPA didn't invite him, in which case they get brownie points for independence, or he decided not to be involved, in which case he gets brownie points for untypical PR restraint.

Of course, it does the government no harm that this report happened to come out in the same week as Noel Dempsey announced a scheme, costing 200m, to promote the development of bio-fuels, ranging from fuel made from rape-seed oil which can be used in modified diesel engines, to bio-ethanol. Dempsey's earlier assault on the plastic bag indicates a fairly consistent personal interest in the environment, despite his getting thumped on a radio programme this week for not knowing the size of the engine in his ministerial Merc.

But the emerging pattern denotes more than personal environmental concern in any one minister. It indicates a Fianna Fail determination to be seen as active and rigorous on the environmental front. That this would have the spin-off benefit of positioning the coalition as an environmentally-responsible administration in the year coming up to a general election.

Thus, in theory, knocking hell out of the Green Party.

Not so long ago, the Greens were the only political party making a big deal out of the natural environment. In the last 10 years, however, the environment has gone mainstream, not least because the European Union . . . heavily influenced by panEuropean Greens . . . has taken a relentlessly prescriptive pro-environment stance. The 'establishment' political parties now have environmental concerns embedded in their policy-making.

The environment has moved from an issue owned by a passionate, frequently ridiculed minority into a mainstream issue owned by everybody. So the Greens have lost their Unique Selling Proposition, right?

Wrong. The Greens' USP was never the environment. Their USP was that they were the unpolitical political party.

Not really politicians in the usual sense.

Given a free pass (and a second preference) for chronic ingrown innocence.

That hasn't changed. They may even demonstrate it by campaigning against backyard burners.

If they do, it's unlikely that Fianna Fail's commitment to the environment will lead them into enthusiastic support of such a campaign.

Because the lads with fire in their barrel are precisely the faithful voters who would see such a campaign as nannystate interference with their simple pleasures.