Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming to the House. The results of the EPA report on the circular economy and waste statistics that were published last week very much threw into sharp light just how much needs to be done with regard to what can be recycled and what is being recycled in Ireland. In fact, the report shows that Ireland is going backwards, not forwards, with regard to recycling. This is particularly so when we see our recycling rates have remained unchanged at 41%, our packaging recycling is going down rather than getting better and, ultimately, just 28% of plastic packaging generated in Ireland was recycled in 2021.

For some time now, a message went out that Ireland was outperforming every other EU member state in recycling. The barefaced reality is actually very different. Ireland has an enormous amount of work to do to improve what it is doing, especially because mandatory targets are coming down the line in 2025. All this comes at a time when we need to encourage households and promote to them about consuming differently, consuming less and reusing what is around them. Yet, we are seeing the path of consumption is going upwards and is not flatlining. Therefore, there needs to be very serious consideration of the whole area of waste management in this country. I have no doubt the Minister of State will tell me about all the great work the Government is doing with the brown bins and the regulatory reviews that are ongoing or have been promised in this whole area.

There is a key issue here. An initiative was announced this morning with regard to brown bins that will be another cost to people. We have to ask about the incentives here regarding the ultimate attitude towards waste in this country. This is at a time when people are really struggling with the cost of living. My big fear is that while initiatives on their own may be welcome, ultimately, they are tinkering around the edges and we are not coming to terms with the scale of what we need to do with recycling in this country. There needs to be a serious conversation about education, the cost of service, the availability of the services and, crucially, who and what is delivering the services.

We have a situation in this country where Dublin, unlike most other EU or European cities, has a privatised waste collection service, and the local authorities are then left to pick up the pieces with everything else. Dublin City Council spends almost €1 million per year collecting illegal dumping. There were 3,200 tonnes of illegally dumped waste in in Dublin city last year. That is the equivalent of more than 106,000 black bins annually. The communities in which I am based, in particular the north inner city, are fed up with illegal dumping. It is a scourge on their communities, but it is right across the country. The key issue here is not the focus on the collection of bins but our overall attitude to waste in this country.

We need to take very seriously the work done by councillors in Dublin City Council. I was one of them in 2019 and we passed a motion calling for the re-municipalisation of services. That led to the commissioning of a report by the Institute of Public Administration. There are a number of very stark facts in that report, along with other research that has been conducted by researchers, which highlight that Ireland does stand apart and that it has a fragmented and disjointed system with regard to waste management and waste collection. Ultimately, if we are to ever get to a place where we have a proper circular economy, where local authorities are not only charged with enforcement but are also able to execute work, which is the real issue here in that local authorities have one hand tied behind their backs with regard to what they can do in waste management, then we need to change the system.

I am asking what the Government is doing to review the whole system of waste management in this country. We believe a number of simple changes to the Waste Management Act could be made to change the current system of waste collection and competition for the market in Dublin and across the country. That is the starting point in working towards a system where local authorities can ultimately take proper, comprehensive control of waste management in Ireland.