Kevin Humphreys (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Owen Keegan and his officials. Certainly this issue has blighted Dublin south east for the past 17 years. If it was not this particular incinerator it was the illegal one that was on Sir John Rogerson's Quay. One of the first protests was Ban the Burn. It is a long time running. It was initially conceived by John FitzGerald, followed on by John Tierney and now Owen Keegan, whom I congratulate on being promoted to be the new Dublin city manager. I had hoped there would be a certain amount of fresh thinking rather than being tied to the past. Certainly the record on this project is not good. We had the problem with the then Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Dick Roche, rushing to approve the signature on the contract before John Gormley became Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government. There have been questions concerning site selection which I will not deal with today; we will try to deal with that issue with An Bord Pleanála. The site selection process does not come through the system lily-white either.

I was taken aback when Mr. Keegan said the whole issue of local authorities not keeping control over waste management was unforeseen. He will be aware of the local authority waste collection report published in 1998 when the collection market was going private - several of the authorities had already gone private at the time. Does Mr. Keegan still believe it was unforeseen that Dublin City Council would lose control over waste collection? I do not think the Panda case is relevant because it came quite some time afterwards. It was an amendment to the Waste Management Act 2001 which clarified the issue. In fact, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, of which Mr. Keegan was manager, was one of the first to dispense with waste management collection. Does "unforeseen" really stand up in this example?