Environmental Policy
Seanad Éireann — 2023-05-03
============================================================

Regina Doherty (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach

I am absolutely fascinated that everything the Minister of State has read out exists. I am delighted that it does, but I have to tell the Minister of State that it is not working. I am even more fascinated by the line "The success of our approach in this area is demonstrated by the most recently available results", which do look great but they are not reflected in what we see. There are the two examples just from the past couple of weeks. I am now going to do an audit of abandoned cars in my county, and I will probably ask others to help me to do the same. It is not working. Both of the agencies I went to with the two examples sent me away to the other agency. That does not really instil confidence that all of these are available. I am genuinely pleased they are available because now I have some ammunition to be able to go back to both of them to say they have powers, authorisation and money and to ask why they are ignoring citizens' requests to get rid of abandoned cars. I can guarantee the Minister of State that the two people who own these cars, and we know who they are because they still have the registration numbers of them, have not even been contacted by An Garda Síochána or by Fingal County Council.
When the Minister of State talks about a 90% reuse and recycling rate and a 97% recovery rate, do these relate only to the vehicles recovered? Is there a list of all vehicles that have been reported and about which nothing is known? That to me would be far more worrying. I am grateful for the information provided by the Minister of State but it does force me to get an audit of the abandoned cars in my county.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2023-05-03/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:50+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-05-03