Waste Management
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-17
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Matt Carthy (SF), Cavan-Monaghan

We all have a shared objective in that regard; we all want to reduce the amount of waste. The difficulty is that in the scenario I spoke about, where these multinational companies essentially secure de facto monopolies in local authority areas where they are the only real option, the knockdown prices go very quickly. You are then back to what are eye watering, staggering costs for waste collection that would not be in place if there were local competitors. Will the Minister of State ask his Department to carry out an analysis, in conjunction with the National Waste Collection Permit Office, in respect of how many operators have licences and are operating within each local authority area and what the average costs are? I think the analysis will find a correlation between a reduction in providers and an increase in cost. Ultimately, this is a twin-track approach. I agree entirely with the Minister of State that we need to reduce waste but we also need to ensure that our families are not being fleeced by these large corporations which are knocking out all of their competitors outside of an agreed policy framework.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-17