Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is a while ago, unfortunately. We were taught to be vigilant about litter and the Tidy Towns committees were starting to get bedded down at the time. I recently attended the hoisting of a green flag in a number of schools. We seem to come back to the point where the amount of waste being disposed of is incredible. People throw waste out of car windows. In one carpark I saw four separate piles of litter. This is an occasional occurrence on weekend mornings. A person will wind down the car windows and throw out the litter of takeaway containers and drinks containers onto the path. The scale of that practice is not the same as a big operator who is dumping thousands of tonnes of rubbish in a serious and hazardous way over a lengthy period. The mechanisms available to local authorities are very weak when they try to pursue these operators and to undo the damage. I remember hazardous waste being dumped in a rural area very close to houses. It took years to pursue that case-----

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