Audio overview of the campaign

by seedotdotdot Wed Mar 02, 2005 02:29

In this piece Joan Collins gives her take on the bin tax campaign, a discussion of the motion that was passed last night in Council and what the likely next developments will be. It was recorded last month before the first time her motion was to be voted on. The interview took place in the transport club in Crumlin which has seen reguler meetings on the bin tax issue for the last four years.

She talks about a campaign that has won recent cases when people were taken to court for non-payment which wipes out the bill for all those with the years outstanding. This charge has been in place for 5 years - and now the first two have been successfully challenged in the courts with a possibility of all previous years charges being likewise beaten. She also discusses the purpose of the recent motion, to ensure collection of all bins. Of the introduction of bins, of the waste management system and of public health. The bin tax campaign has had to learn and think about many of the issues encompassed in it, to seek to find common cause with the bin workers, with the environmental lobby. It has also had to learn about the law after the full force of it was felt in 2003. This time, when the guards arrived to protect rubbish collection vehicles from having rubbish placed in them, the campaign was prepared. They swapped statutes and then had four volunteer names taken to test this in the courts.

Dealing with rubbish on the streets, looking at what happens to waste, how it is paid for and disposed of has been a tough long slog for the campaign. Now they are supported by the zero waste campaign, the local residents associations, by more and more trade unionists. Doctors in Cork are issuing statements which are eerily remniscient of the calls in the mid to late 1870's which saw that the recently introduced bin service in England was extended to Ireland. When the campaign gets a motion passed in council to collect bins on public health grounds there is a throwback to the reasons councils were given their modern form - to look after the public health of their area.

But expect to see the campaign back on the streets in the next few months. The city area will get their first bills and either the registration drive or the council wil have to be tested. At some stage, some resident of this city will put their bin out and the council will just leave it there - on the streets of our city and tell us that doing this is good for the environment. That if the pensioner, if the resident previously on a waiver needed an extra tag, or support in paying their lift charges they should have gone cap in hand - cos it's a privilege now to get your bin collected.

Course when the papers are there, and when the bloods up at the blockades people will talk of the reappearance from nowhere of the bin tax campaign. But it hasn't been nowhere. The courts, the council chambers and the transport club are where this campaign has been working - and it has been working and organising.