Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this discussion. The Bill flips on its head the whole idea of take, make and waste. There is great waste in this country day in and day out. Some of the changes proposed in the Bill could see an annual saving of €2.3 billion if people just changed the way they function. I was listening to a Deputy talk about a new motorway from Cork to Limerick. That money would build most of that motorway and probably a bit extra as well. That puts perspective on the annual waste of some of the bad environmental habits we have come to accept as norms.

The idea of reducing disposable coffee cups is a very good one and I welcome the sanctions in that regard, along the lines of the plastic bag levy which was introduced in the late 1990s with great success. Every town and village also has its takeaway and a lot of foil trays and plastic tubs come out of them. People can recycle them at home if they are willing to throw them into sink, scrub them down and dry them before they go into the bin. Most people fling them straight into the bin. Far too often these tubs are chucked out the window of a car at the local beauty spot after someone has stopped off to have their picnic on their way home from the chipper. There are elements that legislation needs to go after. It is not just all plastic bags and coffee cups. The proliferation of littering takes other forms that we need to tackle as well.

I am enthused to see the Bill finally deal with CCTV and its use in combating illegal dumping. Sections 20 to 23, inclusive, tackle the whole area of GDPR and the provisions allow people to start using cameras in a smart way to detect illegal littering and secure prosecution. That is the only way we are going to get to a head on this. I am chairman of a local environmental group, the Woodcock Hill enhancement committee. For the last two years we have been told repeatedly by legal professionals and Clare County Council that we cannot use cameras. I have asked senior local members of An Garda Síochána if they would refuse to act should we detect an act of littering or a crime and pass footage over to them. They said there was no way they would refuse and that they would gladly take it into a court and test it legally. There has been no test case for this.

I do not believe the GDPR barrier that we are told is prohibiting us from using CCTV exists in real terms. This is some fandangled idea that legal experts have drawn up. I am repeatedly told by people in the legal profession and An Garda Síochána that they will not turn away CCTV footage that is presented to them and is of high quality. In the realm of criminal law in recent years we have seen CCTV camera footage welcomed with open arms in our courts system. I am not convinced it has been a barrier in the last two or three years. We seem to have an interpretation of GDPR in Ireland that is not fully congruent with those of other European nations. I do not get that.

To go on a slight tangent, on all the regulations relating to hedge cutting, I have seen every summer when I go abroad to continental Europe, which is governed by the same EU environmental legislation as us, that people there seem to be able to cut hedgerows while we cannot do so. They seem to be able to use CCTV cameras yet we cannot. I think sometimes there is a skewed interpretation in the Houses of the Oireachtas, in the body legal and the body politic, that cannot take very sensible regulations from Europe and implement them in a simpler way. We were facing the possibility of going to court and trying to prove this in a test case. I am glad it can now be done.

I will tell the House what we use in the Woodcock Hill enhancement committee. We use a trail camera purchased in Lidl. I think it cost us €80. It has a little battery pack on the back. We strap it onto a tree. We know where the litter is always dumped. The batteries last for three or four months. There is a SIM card in it so when a car passes and the boot pops open, I get a message with the photo and video footage. I can see who is dumping and sometimes it is very interesting. Sometimes it is the people we would least expect to be doing so. I would love to abuse Dáil privilege and name them all out but I will not. I do not want to raise blood pressure here tonight but it is very interesting to see who is dumping. We like to profile them in our head and say it is that guy or that woman but it is often very surprising. It is often the person down the road holding down a top career who is chucking stuff out of the boot on a Monday morning on their way to work. They probably know who they are if they are watching this debate. We do not always need to use Dáil privilege. Sometimes what is unsaid is understood in a home environment.

Other forms of enforcement also need to be looked at. We have three litter enforcement officers in County Clare, I think, although we have 800 council staff. I am not diminishing their roles; they all do important jobs. I know what some of them do and I do not know what others do. There are 800 people working for Clare County Council and three of them are working in the domain of litter and waste enforcement. That is wrong. They are under capacity. They do a fantastic job but, by God, how can they tackle a problem when they are that under-resourced?

There are other areas of pollution they cannot go next nor near, for example, noise and air pollution. On 22 January, Ennis town, with a population of 25,000, had air quality worse than Beijing, a city of 21 million people. That says a lot. There is no capacity to go after that. It just gets a headline inThe Clare Championor is mentioned on Clare FM. There is no great follow-up because we do not have the capacity to enforce regulations on noise, air and all the other forms of pollution. We seem to be good at tackling litter waste because it is visible and we take it away and deal with it. We do not have sufficient capacity yet in Ireland to deal with those other forms of pollution.

On wheelie bins, I checked before coming in to the Chamber and €306 is what a national wheelie bin provider is quoting for a 12-month contract. Surely, in 2022, we could make wheelie bins mandatory. There are a lot of people bringing out a little bag and burning it in the back garden by night so the smoke is not seen in the dark. There are people stuffing little bags into bins as they walk down the street. Surely we can do that. We are charging people a lot of money on USC and local property tax. Surely a little bit could be given back to people.

On bins in train stations, I took the train here this morning. In Limerick train station there are recycling and waste bins side by side. I come up to Dublin having had my sandwich and my bottle of Ballygowan and there are no bins. When I do find them they are waste only. It is a simple thing. They should be side by side wherever we go.

On naming and shaming, when I began as a councillor, and I think many Deputies have served on local authorities, the back pages of the council agenda booklet were always printed in pink. We all flicked through them because they listed everyone convicted for a litter fine. That disappeared in the last few years because GDPR said we could not do it. That is codswallop. I think we can and we need to get back to doing it. There is nothing like peer enforcement and seeing that Mary and Joe down the road dumped litter out of their car on Saturday and were fined €150. It is great. It teaches them a lesson they will never forget. We need to get back to publishing that information and let newspapers have a field day. This should be a little feature on page 2 or 3 of The Clare Championevery week. Let us name and shame them. I think legislation can do that.

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