Environment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2025: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-17 ============================================================ Cathal Byrne (FG), Cultural and Educational Panel The Minister of State is most welcome to Seanad Éireann this evening. I will be supporting this legislation. I want to focus specifically on the part of it that deals with amending the litter Act. Unfortunately, as in many Senators' counties, County Wexford has a serious issue with illegal dumping. It is a scourge. The county is absolutely blessed with a beautiful coastline, immaculate mountain ranges and scenic beauty throughout. Unfortunately, though, people take it upon themselves to dump illegally. Figures just released by Wexford County Council for 2025 show 2,441 incidents were reported to it. This means an enormous cost to the taxpayer in that the council has to send out crews to remove the illegally dumped material and take it to be recycled or disposed of. Unfortunately, the numbers are continuing to rise. In fact, in January 2026, which was a short two weeks ago, 147 phone calls were made to Wexford County Council to report illegal dumping. There are examples of people who, when disposing of their Christmas trees, decided to throw all the Christmas gifts out on the side of the road somewhere in rural County Wexford. I am aware that this legislation will amend the Litter Pollution Act to allow judges to convict people rather than having defendants seek to empanel juries or have trials by jury. This is a welcome step but I encourage the Minister of State to go further. County councils should be mandated to publish the names of individuals convicted of dumping. Last year, Wexford County Council went to the courts and managed to secure a number of litter fines. In fact, there were 11 litter convictions in the past six months. Those prosecutions are to be welcomed but the data do not show the names of the people. If you are found guilty of dumping in rural Ireland, your name should be published. The public across Ireland should be able to see exactly who these people are. In fact, the current fines, with a maximum on-the-spot fine of €150 and by court conviction €3,000, are not substantial enough. They are not sufficient to deter someone from taking it on themselves to load up a van, fill it with their neighbour's rubbish, drive out to a rural back lane, tip it out and abandon it there. Those fines need to be increased. The category of the offence for illegal dumping should be increased as well as the fines. There should be an extra penalty for dumping in a special area of conservation, such as a river or a beach. The penalty should be exacerbated for polluting these significant waterways that we have. There is not a week that goes without my constituency office being contacted by a constituent from somewhere in Wexford to say that there are black bags of rubbish floating in such a river and would someone from the council go out and collect it. We have to get to grips with this issue and tough on this issue. The fines introduced in 1997 are not sufficient. When this legislation moves forward through the Seanad, I encourage the Minister of State to take the opportunity to increase those fines. In particular, he should look at increasing the penalties and introducing a name and shame policy. There should be no issues with it. If you are convicted of murder or a serious assault, your name is reported in the papers. There should be no impediment to local authorities naming and shaming individuals convicted of illegal dumping. This issue should be taken substantially more seriously. This is an issue for every Member in this Chamber because they get the same phonecalls that I get. The cost to the taxpayer is continuing to rise year on year and we have to get to grips with it. --- 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/2026-02-17/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:38+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-17