Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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As it does not relate to money, it is not for us now. Back in 2000 in Galway a campaign started for zero waste. It was extremely successful. A model was rolled out and we had 70% diversion from landfill, across everything including composting. That was possible. It ran for six weeks as a pilot project. It was rolled out as a local authority service and had 56% diversion on a weekly basis from landfill. We showed what was possible.

The Government at the time had a plan for incinerators. We are now seeing increasingly bigger dumps in fewer areas. Galway showed we wanted to have a county plan and a city plan all in one. We were willing to deal with our waste in a very sustainable manner. The Government deprived the local authority of the ability to do that by bringing in legislation removing waste management from the local authorities. It is not popular to say this. They are the facts as happened. The power was removed and centralised.

We now constantly blame individuals as polluters. I do not believe they are polluters. I will not go into it here because it is not relevant, but it is important for the record to say that the people of Galway showed what is possible. They indicated that all the things from the engineers' reports and so on that had very low recycling rates were all wrong. We showed what was possible and did it. The Government took it from us, privatised it and took the power from the local authority. There was a combination of forces at work and we will suffer with the taxpayers paying even more money in addition to calling citizens polluters which is unacceptable.