Ulick Burke (Fine Gael)

Can the Minister dish out blame as he has done this evening and at the same time reconcile himself with the situation where people throughout the country, particularly in County Galway, are making a genuine effort to recycle? The Minister has never shown support for their endeavours. There is no market for the mountains of paper and cardboard for recycling. All that happens is that it is taken and dumped in Kill. The Minister's Department has never shown any initiative to cater for facilities where people have made an effort to recycle. Rehab is the only organisation to have shown some initiative and it has collected and segregated various types of waste. We all know of the debacle to do with glass recycling.

The key to many of the difficulties local authority members have had is the identification of a landfill site. We know what happened in Ballinasloe, which provided the only landfill site for both Galway city and county. The licence to accommodate landfill there was extended by the Minister and his predecessors time after time. It is now a crisis. The work the local authority in Ballinasloe has done, in creating a new landfill concept, is a credit to it.

The reason the members of Galway County Council rejected the Galway waste management and the Connacht waste management plans was simple. National consultants came to Galway and identified nine sites through a desk top process. They then made a shortlist of three. The suitability of these sites was questioned by everybody and is still under question.

A group of councillors tried to encourage the consultants to come out and look at particular sites but they refused. The Minister should not imply that we were irresponsible or shirked our responsibility. The Minister knows why they refused to look at those sites. They were not even considered, not because they were not suitable but because the consultants thought better of other areas. As long as the Minister has and supports such an attitude he is distancing himself from local authority members and is creating a barrier to good local government. The sooner the Minister comes down from his pedestal the better.

I do not know how many members of local authorities are present tonight but all of us cringe at what the Minister has said and is about to do. He intends to give the power to local managers who have already, through powers given by the Minister's predecessor, accepted the waste management plans against the wishes of the local authorities. The foundations are creaking. The Minister is not capable of redirecting positive local government.