Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)

I made some points earlier in the debate and made the same ones on Committee Stage, so I will not go over them again. I endorse Deputy Humphreys' point on the rebalancing and transfer of powers between reserve functions and the local government executive. Officials are not elected and will not be held to account, which is a major deficit in our democracy.

Kildare is not short of landfill sites, as the Minister is well aware. The Kill landfill site has taken most of Dublin's waste over the years. We now have Droighead, which is the biggest landfill site in the country, and is owned and controlled by Bord na Móna. We have a great deal of experience with landfill, but it is not something that people tend to want on their doorsteps. The way in which we deal with residual waste is incredibly important. We have seen what has happened in the private sector, as the Minister said, concerning Kerdiffstown. That was a failure of the private sector and of the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA. There is a deficiency concerning the EPA in that it did not have the legal power to close that site down. It will cost the State millions to remedy that. The EPA is doing a good remedial job there at the moment and let us hope that continues. It will require Exchequer resources to continue to do so, but we must also find the point where that failure occurred.

On Committee Stage, the Minister said that what was proposed by Covanta was in the recovery tier. We have all seen that people will go to the trouble of using the bottle bank as well as segregating their waste into various bins. We will take the advantage away from segregation, however, by having such a large facility. We will therefore kill off the recovery tier where we should segregate waste for reuse and recycling. I have a serious problem in this regard and I would oppose the Bill for this aspect alone. Section 7 would at least have provided some sort of counterbalance to a levying system. I have a serious problem with the fact that there is an economic mismatch there also.

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