Fórsa has welcomed a motion on the remunicipalisation of waste management in Dublin city, which was passed by Dublin City Council last week.

The motion also commits the local authority to the creation of a working group to consider how the re-municipalisation of waste management might be advanced. The working group, comprising group representatives and management, is to meet in September and October and report to the Council in November.

Welcoming the motion, the head of Fórsa’s two local authority divisions, Peter Nolan, said: “Across Europe we’re starting to see a reversal of private sector outsourcing of public services, most notably in municipalities that had previously privatised water services.

“The universal experience was that privatised services only mean higher costs and a failure to deliver promised investment and improvement.

“We see the same problem here with domestic waste collection, with Dublin City Council and other Dublin local authorities forced to invest additional resources into cleaning up the residual mess caused by fly-tipping,” he said.

The motion follows the launch of the 2019 ‘Dublin Agreement’ by elected representatives on Dublin City Council in June.

The agreement was launched as a joint initiative by Dublin City councillors, and includes a range of commitments to implement the demands of the Fórsa-led More Power To You campaign, launched in March this year.

The campaign sought substantially increased revenue and funding powers for local authorities, as well as greater autonomy for local government.

Fórsa campaigns director Joe O’Connor added: “We have a significant problem in Dublin with the illegal fly-tipping of waste. The provision of domestic waste collection in Dublin has become a chaotic and uneven service, and all of these problems stem from the decision to turn the service over to the private sector only a few years ago.

“Our campaign sought to reverse this service decline, to bring the service back into local authority control, and establish a regulator for household waste collection. These are measures that would improve the quality of life and environment for Dublin citizens,” he said.