alt Hacker News> I asked shop keeper is it happening often, she confirmed and said that no one is interested in doing otherwise, installing sensors was directly opposed by town council.
One way to address this sort of localism (where there's a significant risk that the owners of the factory are slipping the town councillors the odd brown envelope) is a national regulator. The Irish EPA, which was created to take this sort of thing out of the hands of the local authorities, has been very effective in reducing nuisance pollution; the local authorities used to be mostly pretty useless. Any industrial facility of this sort would be required to self-monitor, and would be subject to inspection; it would have to respond to any complaints, and if the regulator wasn't satisfied it could demand improvements, on pain of withdrawing its operating license.
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Doesn't seem there is anything done in Dublin or other Irish cities though vs Europe? https://urbanaccessregulations.eu/userhome/map I don't believe Dublin city air is all that clean given that the cars are primary mode of transportation.
> (where there's a significant risk that the owners of the factory are slipping the town councillors the odd brown envelope)
This is in no way necessary, and is almost never what's going on. All that is needed is the factory owner quietly telling the town councillors that if they are forced to clean up their emissions, they will not be able to compete with foreign competitors who don't have to do the same, and will be forced to close. Then the town council takes a quick look at just how much of the wages and tax revenues of the town come, directly or indirectly, from the factory, and make sure nothing threatens it.
Now that tariffs are the issue du jour, I'd like to propose that any environmental regulations or labor laws should always be combined with an automatic tariff on any competing products produced in countries that do no have such laws. To not have that means that you are not removing the problem, you are just moving it to somewhere without such laws.