Mr. Adrian Kane:

I will address a number of points the Deputy made. The amount of illegal dumping is a key issue. The most recent statistic I have is from 2018, when almost one in four households had no domestic waste collection service. It is 18% in Dublin. There is a causal link between that and the amount of illegal dumping. That cannot be overcome unless people are obliged to have a service, which cannot be done unless there is some way in which poorer households do not have to pay the full whack with regard to it. It is a simple ask. Our colleagues, Mr. Carrothers and Mr. Doolan, also alluded to this. We invited people over from Norway where all waste collection was brought back in-house. The reason was Norway was left with what is happening here. Waste collection got to the point of only one or two large providers being left in the state. Those providers went bankrupt and the state had to come back in. A will was found in terms of how that was done.

The situation in terms of the licence and how long it would last for, etc., is probably correct. However, the advice we have taken, and we got two different sets of legal advice, is that we do not need constitutional change, although we need to amend the 1996 Act. We need to get back to single provision per local authority and then build in procurement rules around that. That is not doing anybody out of business but allows the State, if it so wants, in whatever guise, to re-enter a public procurement that has some regard for the people who work in the industry. It is a very labour-intensive industry. A buck cannot be made out of it if only half the bins in an estate are being picked up, so the only way to make a buck out of it is to depress wages. That is the only way it happens. If Bord na Móna is taken out of that, it will depress wages more. That is all that will happen. We will end up with a larger section of waste collection going to one of the biggest providers.

That is what will happen.