Privatisation of Waste Collection Service 

Lord Mayor, I have a number of concerns.

This is an enormous end of an era for the Council – we have provided a good service at a reasonable rate but have not moved with the times in terms of marketing and selling the good service.

I have said before that in the good times we were obsessed with money in this country and now we are obsessed paying it back.

Two years into the biggest financial tsumami in the history of the state and we seem to be jumping ship… we’re starting to sell off our ships, our assets… in an economic dip… where we won’t get full value for our waste service.

Plus we are probably in the last dozen or so local authorities who have survived turbulent economic decades and have managed a good service.

In my own personal view, everything that Cork City Council is involved in should not be about making a profit – our decisions affect real people who are also facing the economic tsunami.

I too worry about the vulnerability of low-income families.

I would like to know the socio-economic nature of those who remain with us – especially those on partial or full waiver schemes? It may be all too easy to compare this city with Dublin or other local authority areas. But Cork is not Dublin. It has  a different socio-economic make-up of people.

I read this morning reports by St. Vincent De Paul and Combat Poverty Agency Ireland to central government regarding the privatisation of waste collection.

Indeed, I haven’t seen any consultation by us to such bodies representing low-income families

How much is this going to cost the householder who is a customer of ours?

What will happen to the people who can’t afford private waste charges? I see that if waiver clients cannot pay, we are still bound to collect the waste in any event. Cork City Council be still eligible for cleaning up any dumping that may take place not the private waste operator.

There definitely needs to be legal reform when it comes to the terms and conditions of private waste operators operating in local authority areas. That’s a nettle that central government still has not grasped.

For example I was intrigued to see in Limerick, that its City Council tried to get back into the scheme to provide waivers to low income families who culd not pay …and a legal challenge was mounted by the private operators saying that the Council was taking its potential customer base. So there are alot of questions to be answered

So there are some of the issues I want looked at.