Bin Charges and Protecting the Environment

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday June 12, 2003 17:48 by Justin Moran - Sinn Fein maigh_nuad at yahoo dot com

No-one else has mentioned it so just for people who might be interested the ironically entitled Protection of the Environment Bill 2003 will be debated all day in Leinster House tomorrow to the exclusion of any other legislation or business.

No-one else has mentioned it so just for people who might be interested the ironically entitled Protection of the Environment Bill 2003 will be debated all day in Leinster House tomorrow to the exclusion of any other legislation or business.

This legislation provides for the criminalisation of the Bin Charges No Pay campaign, for the Council to refuse to collect rubbish not paid for, allows for the arrest of actvists who attempt to collect the rubbish themselves, assaults local democracy by taking the power to vote on Charges out of the hands of local councillors (A tribute I think to the success of the campaigns in targetting councillors).

There's 89 pages of stuff of varying degrees of badness contained in the thing but that's just a highlight.