Cork County Council may name and shame litter offenders

Indiscriminate litter offenders in Co Cork may be named and shamed after a senior local authority official agreed with elected members that drastic measures are needed to crack down on roadside dumping.

Sharon Corcoran, head of Cork County Council’s environment directorate, said she would examine a demand to publicly name those apprehended for littering.

Councillors’ concerns come in advance of planned new charges for disposing of waste at civic amenity sites. They believed the charges, which will apply to recyclable waste from July 1, will exacerbate the problem of roadside litter.

Ms Corcoran confirmed local authorities would have difficulty in gearing up its civic amenity centres for the introduction of the new pay-by-weight disposal charges, authorised by the Department of the Environment.

She said new weighing equipment would have to be installed in the 11 centres in Co Cork, alone, and additional personnel would have to be deployed to oversee the planned new operation.

The council, she said, had written to the department requesting a postponement of the new charges to allow the local authority to install equipment in amenity sites.

Effectively, recycable goods such as paper, plastic, and cardboard will require separate weighing facilities at each site. Other than an admission charge of €3, no charge is applicable for recycable waste currently at the centres.

Independent county mayor John Paul O’Shea said he could “foresee a huge amount of littering” as a result of the new charges. Tidy Towns groups, he said, would be put to the pin of their collar dealing with it and the council’s specialist units, which clean up fly-tipping blackspots, “will be working even harder”.

“I can guarantee you if a pay-by-weight service is introduced it will cause huge trouble and put civic amenity sites at risk of not being viable. This message needs to go back to [the] caretaker minister,” Mr O’Shea said.

“Fly-tipping is getting worse and it will increase again because of this,” said Fianna Fáil councillor Ian Doyle.

Fine Gael councillor Kay Dawson claimed: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the countryside dirtier. We’re showing ourselves to be one of the dirtiest nations in the world. It really infuriates me to see the mess we leave our countryside in.”

At the request of Independent councillor June Murphy, councillors agreed to write to the minister for the environment asking him to postpone the pay-by-weight introduction.

Ms Corcoran said the department had proposed minimum charges for both local authorities and private waste collectors. They are to be set at 6c per kilo of black- bag type waste,4c per kilo for recyclables, and 2c per kilo for food waste.

“The civic amenity sites are loss-making,” she said. “If we introduce this charge, will the consumer change behaviour? will they burn it or dump it? You’d have to be a very optimistic person to assume there won’t be more illegal dumping.”

She also offered to examine Mr O’Shea’s suggestion to name and shame litter culprits. He said other local authorities did it.