Galway city council should bring waste collection services back into public ownership People Before Profit insist.
Household waste collection in Galway city is currently run mainly by private operators like the The City Bin Company and other service providers.
But PBP have said that privatised waste management is a flawed service, claiming that lower income households resort to illegal dumping when they cannot afford the fees.
Drawing parallels between waste collection and housing, the socialist party said that privatising services can hurt the public interest.
They added that last year the government’s Price Monitoring Group reported that householders were ‘struggling to make meaningful comparisons on waste collection fees because of poor online or phone information from many of the dozens of firms in the market’.
“Over-reliance on private firms to provide this service has resulted in what are essentially oligopolies in Irish cities and counties,” PBB local representative Joe Loughnane said.
“A publicly-owner waste management service could be more transparent and keep costs down for households, and for that reason we will be starting a campaign on this issue over the coming weeks and months to spread the word and get feedback from the wider community”
