Campaign to resume bin depot pickets

Pickets will be placed on Dublin City Council's bin depots again next week, the anti-bin charge campaign said yesterday.

Last week pickets halted the city and south county bin collection services for two days, which left up to 100,000 bins uncollected, some for almost a week.

Speaking at a press conference in Dublin's Buswells Hotel yesterday, Mr Joe Mooney of the Dublin campaign said the pickets at bin depots would resume next week unless the councils gave an undertaking not to proceed with their policy of "no payment, no bin collection".

"If all bins are being collected to date, there will be no need [for pickets\]. But if not, in a matter of days we will be resuming." Mr Mooney would not be pressed on exactly when the pickets would resume, but repeated that if the councils and the Government did not give an undertaking to suspend their policy, protests at the depots would resume. Last night a spokeswoman for Dublin City Council said no such undertaking would be forthcoming.

Mr Mooney and other speakers called on the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) to take a more active role in the dispute and to raise the issue at its meeting with the Government next week. Mr Joe Higgins TD said there was huge anger at the ICTU among ordinary workers because it was not taking a more active role. The union should use its meeting to "tell the Government that if non-collection is suspended, then the debate can continue".

Mr Higgins challenged the media to provide a platform for a proper debate between the protesters and the Government. It was a debate he had no doubt the protesters would win. The Government hadn't seen the water charges as a powerful issue until the Dublin West by-election and afterwards they dropped the charges. He was convinced the bin charges would follow suit when the Government realised the strength of opposition.

Mr Richard Boyd Barrett said pickets would not be resuming at Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown depots as the policy of non-collection had been suspended there. However, he accused that council and the other Dublin local authorities of being wrong in their estimate of the numbers who had paid their charges. He also criticised sections of the "national media" which he said had accepted these figures without checking.

In relation to Dún Laoghaire- Rathdown, he said Freedom of Information Act releases had shown that about 38,000 households were not compliant. In addition, approximately 25 per cent (16,000) of the total 65,000 households had a waiver. When it was put to him this meant that approximately 54,000 households were not compliant, Mr Boyd Barrett said he believed in recent weeks the numbers of households who had paid the tax had risen, but it was still 12,000 to 15,000.