The pair of red-and-white striped funnels reach for the sky, belching out toxic excess.

She lives in Five Oaks Village, outside Drogheda, but the proverbial crow would have to fly for just over two miles to reach the stacks of the cement factory in Carronstown. To her mind, the stacks serve notice to a far worse facility that is due to be built on an adjoining site. Like many in her locale, Whelan is preoccupied at the prospect of living in the shadow of Ireland's first municipal waste incinerator.

"I have three children, it's them I'm worried about, " she says. "Children breathe much quicker, they take in pollutants. And in any event, nobody can guarantee there won't be an accident at that site. Then what?"

Her concerns are echoed by thousands of people in a four-mile radius of the proposed site outside the Co Meath village of Duleek. Last week, the developer, Indaver Ireland, was granted planning permission for the 80m incinerator. Barring an unlikely refusal by An Bord Pleanala, construction will begin early next year, bringing down the curtain on six years of sustained opposition from local people.

Among those opposed are Tom and Rosemary Butterly, whose home is a stone's throw from the proposed site. "It seems to us that Duleek is just being used as a dumping ground, " Tom says. "It's as if, 'that's a handy place, let's just throw everything in there'."

His wife agrees. "The traffic that is going to be generated is one of the other major things. It's already lethal with people flying through here commuting between Drogheda and Dublin. What's it going to be like with those trucks coming in and out?"

A health issue, pure and simple Duleek, like many small conurbations in the expanding Dublin catchment area, used to be a village. Now it retains the infrastructure of a village, but is being swamped by housing estates, many of whose occupants are refugees from the capital's soaring property market.

Six miles down the road is Laytown, recently in the headlines over a shortage of school places, highlighting an infrastructure deficit caused by a failure to keep pace with frantic house-building. In Duleek, they have a different infrastructure issue.

Many feel their village is to be used as a dumping and testing ground for the state's first incinerator.

The six years have seen community resistance in all its guises, through meeting, raising money, hiring experts, on to public hearings and a court case that is currently before the Supreme Court.

Everybody involved in the No Incineration Alliance (NIA) insists that the Nimby culture never formed a part of their campaign.

"It's a health issue, " says Aine Walsh. "Pure and simple. Even in terms of monitoring what is going on in there, the Environmental Protection Agency has a terrible history of non-enforcement."

The health issue is nearly impossible to determine definitively. The World Health Organisation has given the green light to properly monitored and defined incineration, but serious questions still remain about the extent and dangers of pollutants emitted through the process. Either way, the government has expressed itself satisfied about the process and incineration is a core element of the national waste strategy.

That policy swayed An Bord Pleanala in rejecting appeals against the initial planning permission for the incinerator. An inspector recommended that the board uphold the appeals, but the board invoked government policy to allow Indaver to proceed.

While incineration is government policy, many ministers have a strange approach to its implementation. Justice minister Michael McDowell opposes a proposed incinerator in Ringsend to the extent that he stopped cabinet bringing in a critical infrastructure bill until the bill was rewritten to omit the Ringsend plan. Enterprise, trade and employment minister Micheal Martin opposes a toxic incinerator in his constituency in Cork. And environment minister Dick Roche, who is charged with waste management policy, has said he would oppose an incinerator in his constituency.

Duleek also had a minister in Noel Dempsey, who didn't oppose the incinerator. While his attitude angered locals, he couldn't be accused of the double standards that appear to infect his colleagues.

Indaver's approach to the planning system suggests it is playing a long game. Initial planning permission was granted five years ago for an incinerator to burn 150,000 tonnes a year. Among the 33 conditions was one that stipulated that the waste must come from the four counties in the northeastern waste management region.

Since then, the company has lobbied the Department of the Environment intensively to allow it to take waste from outside those boundaries. Indaver's chief executive, John Ahern, says this was because the standing arrangements were impractical as waste collectors didn't operate within the same boundaries.

Last year, the department relented. Early this year, Indaver applied for new permission, with the relaxed catchment area rules and an increased capacity of 200,000 tonnes a year. Permission was granted last week.

The NIA will appeal again, but the smart money says Indaver is on the home straight. Aine Walsh believes the fight is worth taking to the very end.

"We don't need incineration in this country, " she says. "They might have it elsewhere in western Europe but so what? Those countries have nuclear power and we don't. We still don't know the dangers of all the pollutants."

The only remaining obstacle As far as waste policy is concerned, even a change of government is unlikely to make a difference.

Local Labour councillor Dominic Hannigan says a zero waste policy that doesn't require incineration works in other countries.

"I would hope that if the Labour party gets into government our anti-incineration policy would continue, " he says. "We need more recycling and a cleaner way of dealing with waste."

The only remaining obstacle to the advent of municipal incineration in the country is now Indaver itself. The company's latest move in the long game is to lobby for advantage over competitors in the waste business. The company maintains that landfill operators enjoy a very benign tax regime, which must be changed to incentivise incineration in line with government policy. It says that, unless incentives are offered for the industry, the plant may not go ahead. Ahern says the policy is excellent but it must now be pushed along.

"Taxes for landfill are now only 15 per tonne, while the EU average is 50. There is room for an increase and we need some certainty before we go ahead. Nobody gambles on 100m."