Waste Management (Single Household Waste Collection Service) Bill 2026: Second Stage [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2026-07-16 ============================================================ Marie Sherlock (LAB), Dublin Central In the spirit of solidarity, as a proud Corkonian who is very proud to now call Dublin home, I extend my support to Mayo as well. They might just do it this time round. I thank all those who came to support the Bill today, including Deputies Ivana Bacik, Mark Ward, Gary Gannon, Paul McAuliffe and Roderic O'Gorman. It is very clear that while we may all have a slight difference in emphasis about what we want to see, there is very much a clarion call that we do need to see some change, particularly in Dublin, and an acknowledgement by the Government that we have to empower the local authorities in Dublin to be able to bring about that change. Deputy McAuliffe made a really powerful point that we do not necessarily need to legislate for the whole country but we have to be able to empower and enable local authorities to find the right system for their areas because, as somebody who grew up in a very rural area, I know the challenges with regard to fly tipping there are completely different from the issues in my home in the north inner city. The reality is that Dublin finds itself at a juncture. The reason so many people have come to express anger and frustration over the past few months is because a private bin company is effectively foisting a change upon them relating to what is a public service in terms of a bin collection service and the local authority has been rendered almost powerless because it exerts little or no control over those companies. I pay tribute to a lot of the work that many officials and workers in Dublin City Council do because, in some ways, their hands are tied behind their back. They recognise the issue with regard to landlord responsibility. I am very disappointed to hear the Minister of State's comments about landlord responsibility. Nobody is talking about landlords hovering over their tenants to see whether they put out their bin on a Tuesday morning. This is about making sure there is a waste contract attached to the tenancy. It is then up to the tenants to try to make good that, but in many instances there is no contract and tenants are in the dark as to what they should do, so we need to try to ensure we do everything possible. There is no silver bullet with regard to illegal dumping, litter on our streets and all the issues relating to waste. They will all add up but we have to show a willingness to take action. That is the regrettable thing today. We eagerly await this independent review and yet we see that so many of the arguments put forward effectively eviscerate what we are proposing today, so the Government is already pre-empting the outcome of the independent review by effectively rejecting the proposal we are bringing forward, and I regret that. My background has always been to support the evidence, but we see so many other European cities do things very differently and I think most of us would accept that when one walks the streets of so many other European cities, they are vastly cleaner than Dublin. We want to make our city better. The other important thing to say is that we did not hear any new ideas today, and I say that with the greatest respect to the Minister of State. We did not hear any ideas with regard to the profound challenges we have regarding our plateauing recycling rates and all the other issues that are there. That is disappointing. This is a forum to bring forward the Government's ideas. If it is not going to accept our ideas, it should bring forward its own ideas but we did not hear any of those. The leader of the Minister of State’s party, the Tánaiste, wrote very enthusiastically about the recommendations of the Dublin task force just before the general election in 2024, and a very clear recommendation was to move to a single operator. That seems to have fallen off the wagon in the months since then but it was a very clear recommendation. The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission undertook a very detailed analysis in 2018. I would be very careful not to disparage the work that went into its report. I ask that the Government be very careful in its commentary with regard to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission. I disagree with it on many other things but we have to respect what it wrote, in particular with regard to waste management. We eagerly await this report. It was supposed to be published in the spring. We have not heard a date from the Minister of State today and we would like to hear that date. This fight is not going away. It is about our communities, cost and control. We will stand unified in having another go at this to try to change how Dublin, in particular, deals with its waste. As the final speaker before the Ceann Comhairle, I wish to thank her for her excellent work over the past year. I think everybody across this Chamber would acknowledge she runs a very tight operation and it is hugely appreciated. We all have lots of issues we want to bring forward and it is genuinely appreciated. I thank her for her work and everything she does here. I also thank all of the staff. There are many staff we never see in Leinster House, particularly those of elected representatives, in the Bills Office and in all the other areas. I say thank you to our cleaners, the catering staff, those in broadcasting and to all of our staff. This place would not run without the benefit of people's work over very long hours, as I know when I have to leave my office sometimes after midnight or 1 a.m. when the ushers are kindly asking me to allow them to lock up. I thank everybody and wish them a good summer. --- 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/dail/2026-07-16/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:17+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-16