Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The news that Panda is hiking up its bin charges will be no surprise to customers who have had to pay hefty bin charges in this country since 2003, when the move to bring in bin charges was imposed. That was 20 years ago. Along with 27 activists, I went to prison over protests to stop bin charges. We did this not because we are miserable and do not want to pay our way in society, but because we predicted at the time, quite rightly, that it would be a disaster, that it would lead to the privatisation of waste collection services up and down the country, and that this privatisation would in turn be a disaster for workers, for the environment and for the communities which these services are supposed to serve.

The news that Panda will charge for organic waste is a contradiction of what we were told at the time by the State and the Department of the environment, and what we are being told now, which was that encouraging people to recycle was the reason bin charges were brought in. In that process of recycling, they will now be charged for the organic waste, much of which for decades was dumped at the back of where I live on Kylemore Avenue in a facility that was owned by Thorntons. In the last year or so, they have moved the organic waste out of Ballyfermot under pressure from the local community and on foot of the constant campaigning to the Environmental Protection Agency that we had to do. Now that it has been moved out of there, we no longer have the odours, the inconvenience and the toxic air that spread through Ballyfermot for many decades.

All that aside, we now have a company that was bought for €1.4 billion from Mr. Eamon Waters of Beauparc Utilities by an Australian infrastructure fund. An Australian infrastructure fund is raising bin charges to ordinary consumers by approximately €100 a year for 26 lifts. At the same time, what we are witnessing as a result of the privatisation of the service is large dirty diesel-run trucks running up and down estates not once a week but every day of the week. Those who live in working-class estates will know that this is what has resulted from competition. People are going to Thorntons, to Panda or to City Bin. There is a plethora of waste management companies, and most of them are registered offshore so that their profits are not up for scrutiny. We have a measure of a lot of their profits. By God, their profits are rising astronomically. I will read out some of them later on. Even in this cost-of-living crisis, they are gaining and people are losing out.

Is it not time for the State to call for the renationalisation and remunicipalisation of waste management services throughout the country? It has been a disaster for the environment, for workers and for ordinary people who have to pay the charges. It is time to reverse that and do the right thing for all the reasons I have mentioned.

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