Mr. Des Crinion:

Very quickly on that, looking around the country we can see the investment that has been put into the privatised waste industry. I think we are all of an age to remember when every town, village and city had an illegal landfill. When we were growing up there was no proper waste collection. We maybe went to a one-bin system. Now we have a three-bin system. Every bin has a chip and it is weighed. We talked about thermal incineration and all our recycling facilities. There are eight massive recycling facilities around the country. We are making fuel for cement kilns that is replacing imported fuel and we are ready to invest in the next stage to get into recycling when it makes sense here in Ireland. The big blockages for us and the big worry, which was brought up earlier, is we do not have enough infrastructure to manage the amount of waste we create. The big blockage is our planning system does not allow for waste infrastructure and is very slow. Our licensing is extremely slow when it comes to getting or amending a licence.

I will be honest that a lot of family firms and foreign investors are very worried when we talk about remunicipalisation because it is very difficult to invest over a five-, ten- or 15-year period, which is what is needed for these massive infrastructures to manage the huge amount of waste. When there is uncertainty within a market, people will not want to invest. They are a number of the stumbling blocks.