Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I raise the topic of illegal dumping which seems prevalent at the moment, perhaps because local elections are upcoming and people are out and about more often. It occurs in urban areas but particularly in rural areas. I keep seeing photographs on Facebook of local election candidates and sitting councillors who have been canvassing somewhere and there are 50 black bags in a field which have sometimes been set on fire. I do not know whether an industry is involved and people are collecting this waste from houses and dumping it, or whether it involves people disposing of their private waste. I call on the Leader to ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Richard Bruton, to come and discuss this topic in this House as a matter of urgency.

Illegal dumping seems to be rampant across the country. I know there is an issue of people dumping in urban areas. Sometimes people move out of houses and 100 black bags and various other items are discovered in the back garden. I often see bags that are full of cans, bottles and paper, all of which can be recycled for free. It may be that the civic centres and recycling facilities to which people can bring such items are a long way away but education is probably needed. Maybe waste collectors are very expensive and that is an issue.

We need to survey households to see where their waste is going. Many people responsibly dispose of their rubbish through a door-to-door collector or go to civic recycling facilities. My former local authority, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, which covers the area in which I live, is winning awards for having good recycling centres. I am sure most local authorities have very good recycling centres but there will be a residual amount of waste that is not recyclable. We need to try to reduce that as much as possible by examining what packaging is permitted to be recycled and what is not because illegal dumping is a scourge right across the landscape. I saw a Tidy Towns clean-up in Ballybrack in Dublin which, very easily and quickly, produced hundreds of bags and that is a relatively urban area where waste collection is available.

I ask the Leader to facilitate a debate on the waste market as soon as possible. I am not giving out about waste collectors which do their job well, by and large. There are certainly people who are not using these services and are not disposing of their waste responsibly by other means. We need to look at what can be done about that. The practice of people throwing sofas, electronic equipment and black bags into hedges during the night must not be allowed to continue. The rest of us ultimately have to pay to have it cleaned up.