Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. I am answering this matter because the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, recently delegated authority over waste policy and the circular economy to me.

I appreciate that the Deputy has had a long series of engagements on this issue and that it is not yet resolved.

The waste management market in Ireland is serviced by private companies, on a side-by-side competition basis. Prices in the market are matters between those companies and their customers subject to compliance with all applicable legislation, including contract and consumer legislation.

The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, published A Waste Action Plan for a Circular Economy in September of last year. The plan includes more than 200 measures and will shift the focus away from waste disposal and looks instead to how we can preserve resources by creating a circular economy.

In June 2017, the Government decided to phase out flat-fee or flat-rate charges for residual kerbside household waste collection to deliver on national policy and to ensure that Ireland meets current and future waste targets as well as to ease the pressure being placed on our capacity to manage residual municipal waste. The Government decision also envisaged "the provision of a financial support to persons with lifelong/long-term medical incontinence to help meet the cost of disposal of medical incontinence wear".

Since mid-2017, a range of charging options have operated, which encourage householders to reduce and separate their waste. This provides flexibility to waste collectors to develop various service-price offerings that suit different household circumstances. Mandatory per kilogramme pay-by-weight charging was not introduced. A price monitoring group, PMG, was established in mid-2017 to monitor the ongoing cost of residential waste collection to homeowners across Ireland as the flat-rate structure was being phased out. While fluctuations in prices and service offerings have been observed, the overall trend has been relative price stability. Results from the PMG are available on my Department's website.

Since the 2017 decision to phase out flat-rate fees, the Department has examined a number of proposals to deliver the proposed support for incontinence waste, including through detailed engagement with the HSE, Department of Social Protection, National Waste Collection Permit Office, Office of the Data Protection Commissioner and relevant non-governmental organisations in an effort to find a workable scheme for the delivery of such a support. Unfortunately these efforts have not been successful to date, including due to the absence of a list of persons who are in receipt of free medical incontinence wear from the HSE. However, general data protection regulation, GDPR, issues arising, including consent and principle of data minimisation, and procurement issues and administrative costs if a private third party were to deliver the support on behalf of my Department, were also contributing factors.

My officials are continuing to review these efforts to establish what further actions, if any, can be taken pending the availability of the list of recipients of free medical incontinence wear from the HSE.

It should be noted that there has never been a national waiver scheme for household waste collection. During the period in which local authorities were directly involved in the collection of household waste, a minority of individual local authorities offered different levels of discount to selected households, based on different qualification criteria. As local authorities exited the waste collection market, some required the private operators that took on the local authorities' customers to provide a level of discount for existing waiver customers only, and even then, for only a limited time.

With the exception of one or two municipal districts, local authorities no longer collect waste. Waste collection is now serviced by a diverse range of private operators, where the fees charged are a matter between service provider and customer and the range of services and fees offered vary amongst providers and across the country. In that regard, it is apparent that a national waiver scheme could not be imposed in the context of an open market for waste collection.

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