Cllr Anthony Connaghan has criticised Dublin City Council Management on the recent handover of the City’s Waste Collection Service and they must be challenged on their negotiation of this deal. “I am a member of the Environmental and Engineering Strategic Policy Committee and we weren’t aware of the finer details of the contract. Only at the last minute were we told that there would be a €100 standing charge and that accounts needed to be in credit before bins would be lifted. This caused great confusion amongst Dublin citizens, many of whom couldn’t afford the upfront charges. The DCC line was that there would be a smooth transition and basically what would happen was, that one day the bins would be collected by DCC and the next day it would be Greyhound doing the collecting and from then on in, the bills would come from Greyhound. Unfortunately this is not what happened. To this day there are still missed collections and some homes are still waiting to get tags sent to them from Greyhound”.
Cllr Connaghan thinks it hypocritical for Fianna Fail to have put motions into the Council trying to stop the privatisation of the bins when it was a Fianna Fail Minister who took the power away from the Councillors. The same could be said for the Labour Party for paying lip service to peoples troubles when they are now in Government and could have stopped this happening in the first place.
It is clear that this Government is pursuing a privatisation agenda as part of a failed Austerity strategy that is bringing misery to people in Dublin and across Ireland. Because of this we are seeing
widespread cutbacks, punitive charges, more stealth taxes and mass unemployment and emigration.
We in Sinn Féin will continue to oppose privatisation and defend public services at every opportunity.