Mon, Dec 18, 2023
Read in 2 minutes
Cllr. Janet Horner, Area Rep. Feljin Jose, and Neasa Hourigan TD discuss measures to reduce litter and illegal dumping in the city.
Transcript:
Cllr. Janet Horner
The litter and dumping are absolutely huge issues in the inner city. We see it all around us on our streets and it’s an incredibly frustrating issue for the residents around here.
We really want to take a lot more serious action on this. So recently I convened a meeting with Minister Ossian Smyth with council representatives and other stakeholders to look at how we can increase enforcement.
On the back of those meetings, the council has agreed to do increased checks on bags to figure out who is dumping. And then on the back of that, they’ll be issuing fines and then are willing to take those cases to court where necessary. The other thing that we want to see is an increase in powers for the council to take action against landlords. So there’ll be a miscellaneous provision bill being brought through in the new year by Minister Ossian Smyth and we want to see in that that the council get those powers so they can take action on landlords who we know are encouraging and enabling tenants to do dumping.
Area Rep. Feljin Jose
It’s planned that enforcement will be targeted in areas like Dublin Central, where there’s a huge number of households without a waste contract.
Revenue are also looking at how to use unclaimed tax credit information to better target these landlords. Dublin City Council will do a leaflet drop in the new year to inform people in the area about these changes.
Neasa Hourigan TD
In 2022, we did bring forward legislation to make the rollout of CCTV on dumping much more effective and possible for councils. They’re currently dealing with how they’re going to roll that out in terms of a code and we are going to see more CCTV operating in terms of waste in the new year.
Privatisation of the waste collection in cities certainly hasn’t really worked and I know Green Party councillors like Janet and soon Feljin hopefully will be working on expanding a more municipal approach to waste collection, particularly in. In urban situations like inner city Dublin, where it would work very well.
Most of us are doing the right thing. Some of us, a very small group, are letting the side down and we really think that some of these items would very much improve things.