SIPTU members employed by Bord na Móna Recycling will meet later this month to consider industrial action, up to and including a strike, to safeguard the future of the country’s last publicly-owned domestic waste collection service.
SIPTU Transport, Energy, Aviation and Construction Divisional Organiser, Adrian Kane, said: “Across Europe, and increasingly so in Ireland, the consensus is forming that the most effective way, both environmentally and financially, to provide domestic waste collection services is through public enterprises.
“While this consensus is shared by Dublin City Council, the Dublin City Taskforce and the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action, we have what amounts to a caretaker Government rushing through the sale of the last publicly-owned domestic waste collection service in Ireland. Our members are calling for an immediate halt to this ill-thought-out privatisation attempt. It is time to put the common good before private sector profits.
“Today, we have written to Bord na Móna management to inform it that our members will hold a general meeting to discuss the action they will take to prevent the sale of this public utility – a sale that would be detrimental to workers, communities and the environment. The sale would fatally undermine the creation of a speedy route towards the remunicipalisation of domestic waste collection services in a manner similar to that recently implemented in Berlin, Norway and numerous other parts of Europe.
“Our members will also be contacting all the likely participants in the incoming government to brief them on the national resource which they are about to squander. Bord na Móna Recycling should not be sold off but rather developed as the motor of a new public domestic waste collection service. This is what makes sense, it is what people want and it is the environmentally sound way to proceed.”
He added: “It is obvious that any pretence of a ‘just transition’ for Bord na Móna workers has long been abandoned. It is clear that while the Government claims to be concerned with long-term environmental planning, it remains more enthralled at enriching private companies at the expense of the public good.”