Exploding Garbage Trucks

LUSK -- Bernie Goldbach asks what answers the protestors have to alternative payment for the refuse collection. Oddly enough, the protestors seem to be a little short on answers as to how rubbish collection should be funded. As I pointed out in my original posting, IMO waste collection and disposal is too important an issue to privatise.

Minister Martin Cullen [Irish Environment minister] has already gone on record to say that waste management should be addressed from a national perspective, and not by the councils. So where does the alternative lie? Should central government assume responsibility for waste collection and disposal? Should such activity be paid for by central funds?

I spoke to a refuse collector this morning - he asked me if I was 'one of them' and 'was I going to cause trouble?'. I explained to him I was a resident in Lusk and I was putting my bin out for collection. He was driving a different lorry today - a road sweeper - having 'paid his dues' this week having been ambushed in the middle of a street collection in Santry yesterday. 'You pay road tax for a car, why shouldn't you pay bin tax for your refuse collection?'. 'Because I can choose not to have a car' I replied.

The radio stations seems to be getting a lot of mileage from requests for

'My old man's a dustman,
he wears a dustman's hat,
he wears 'cor blimey trousers
and he lives in a council flat.'

Trouble is beginning to brew in City Centre Dublin also. The council there is determined to adopt the same policy as Fingal did this week - no tag, then no collection.

Rural people in Ireland are looking in on the protests ensuing on the streets of Dublin with some consternation, since many rural areas have paid for refuse collection for years. They pay water rates too.

We are still waiting for our bin to be collected today. Only in Ireland. The waste disposal truck got 'ambushed' in Skerries a few miles to the coast, and still hasn't made it to Lusk.

Meanwhile, Fingal County Council should really learn from these incidents. It has become painfully obvious that they have been wrongfooted on this one. A truck is still in Santry, abandoned save for a lone security guard, as protestors have hemmed it in. Fingal CoCo's public relations department have been reduced to issuing warning statements - saying that a waste disposal truck that can't release its load becomes 'a timebomb' due to the build up of methane.

'One wrong cigarette and the whole thing could go up' said one council official.