Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I find the Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Labour Party and potentially the Green Party position on this issue bizarre. All of them were complicit in the privatisation of our waste services, a service provided for 80 to 100 years through local authorities and introduced specifically to address the issue of cholera, waste on our streets and to prevent the spread of disease. It was a very progressive step forward. Every household had their waste collected from outside their door.

As has been said already, I and other Deputies who were involved in the anti-bin charges campaign in Dublin in the early 2000s were blamed for privatisation of the service here. Almost 94% of the local authorities that privatised their services did so before the Dublin authority did so. The reason Dublin City Council was so late privatising its service was because people refused to pay by means of a mass non-payment campaign because they knew that once the service was commodified through EU legislation, it would have to be opened up to the market and competition.

People knew that they were not the polluters. They were receiving the polluted goods and were then told they had to divide up the waste themselves, in other words, do the work for the waste industry. They had to recycle, put all the waste in the different bins and then pay for those to be collected. People were well aware of what was going on and that these companies were coming into the market to make profits, and that is what they have done.

The situation with Greyhound, which locked out its workers in 2014, is disgraceful. Those workers were supposed to have been protected through the transfer of undertakings in that industry, yet they were locked out of their workplace. They lost their jobs because the company said they were eating into its profits and it had to reduce the wages of those people. They were only 30% above what other workers were getting. It was disgraceful that those other workers were getting such low money. Those Greyhound workers were literally taken from the car parks and brought to the industry at the time.

We have had this debate on the waste industry over and over again. Waste management has to be brought back under local authority control. These prices should be frozen until an investigation takes place into the industry. That was supposed to have happened two years ago and a report on the industry and the cartel nature of these companies was to have been brought forward.

I want to make a specific point about the €75 annual payment to householders for the disposal of incontinence pads. That is not going to the householder; it is going to the waste industry. It is subsidising the waste industry. That waste is going to landfill but it should be incinerated. I received an email from a citizen in which he stated that the HSE supplies 54,000 users with incontinence wear at home or in residential care, and that the HSE supplies 10,000 deliveries to acute hospitals. He further stated this means that if each of the 54,000 users use four pads per day, multiplied by seven days, multiplied by 52 weeks, a staggering 78 million incontinence nappies are going to landfill when they should be incinerated.

Fifteen years ago, we should have been examining how we could encourage people to recycle their waste. If people are still putting waste in black bins, they should pay for it, but everything should be put in place. People want to recycle, and they want to go down to their recycling centres to do that.

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