Willie Penrose (Westmeath, Labour)

I compliment my colleague, Deputy Gilmore, on bringing forward this important motion to ensure the Government takes cognisance of the issues and introduces a national waiver scheme in respect of the various domestic refuse charges. The Government should have learned its lesson from today's Supreme Court decision and the electronic voting fiasco over which the Ministers, Deputies Cullen and Noel Dempsey, presided. It is time the Government took cognisance of what people have to say on this side of the House. If it does, it will no longer end up in court spending significant sums of money which could more profitably be expended on ordinary people throughout the land. Just because an idea comes from the Opposition does not mean it is bad. There is no reason to assume a voluntary organisation cannot have some inspiration about how to administer various schemes more effectively and efficiently.

A waiver scheme has always existed in Westmeath. Irrespective of legal advice, we put the scheme in place to ensure that ordinary working class people, especially pensioners and those on invalidity payments, received a waiver. We always supported the idea that refuse collection should remain within local authority control. This is the context in which part of the problem arises. When services are privatised, people contend that a waiver system cannot be implemented. When Westmeath introduced a tag system some years ago, the Labour Party members of the local authority ensured a waiver system remained in place. We put two structures in place. If a person is over 75, he or she need not furnish evidence of income to receive a waiver. It is applied on submission of a birth certificate. If a person is under 75 and in receipt of old age pension, invalidity payment or any social welfare benefit, he or she receives a certain number of tags.

Thank God, Fianna Fáil lost control of the council last June. Previously, the party used its one-vote majority by bringing a person from a sick bed to push through the private contracting of the refuse collection service. The Labour Party stuck to its guns and said that while Fianna Fáil could privatise the service, it could not allow the waiver system to fall. People over 75 now receive 24 refuse tags, 12 of which are for the recycling system. Each tag is valued at €8 so for those who get 18 tags the waiver is €144. People under 75 can receive 12 tags divided between ordinary and recycled refuse. We ensured those provisions were enshrined.

In Meath, where we thankfully have a strong candidate in Councillor Dominic Hannigan, the average refuse collection charge is approximately €380 per year but no waiver system exists. Meath always crowed about being better than Westmeath at football, but we have reversed that. Thankfully, we are better than Meath when it comes to ensuring that ordinary working class people are looked after. They have paid for services and continue to be willing to pay.

I was raised in a household as the eldest of ten children. We did not have running water and used a dry toilet, but we still had to pay rates. My father was a council worker and ours was a working class family. My father and mother reared two pigs each year, one of which was sold in June and one in December to pay the rates. Working class people do not resist paying for services once they see some value for money.

The Government must take cognisance of the fact that people on low incomes do not have disposable money to throw around like confetti unlike well-heeled people. It is time to rectify the anomaly in this area. My colleague, Councillor Dominic Hannigan, is articulating this viewpoint strongly on behalf of the Labour Party. We will take our message across the Meath constituency to ensure that people are treated equally in each county. It is our job to articulate the Labour Party policy on which we will stand in a general election. We have been proved with our Fine Gael colleagues to have been right on many issues.

It is time for the Government to take common-sense advice from these benches instead of firing money at consultants and legal advisers. Our candidate is effective and efficient and will give the people of Meath the advice they need. We encourage the implementation of a national waiver scheme to ensure the same rules apply whether one lives in Dublin, Cork, Donegal, Westmeath or Meath.

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