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2 October 2003 Edition

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What's the anti-bin charge campaign really about?

BY ROISIN DE ROSA

There are two indisputable facts about the bin charges campaign: 47 percent of Dublin householders didn't pay, and the government has silenced two elected representatives who opposed the government, TD Joe Higgins and councillor Clare Daly, by sending them to jail for a month.

Imprisoning political opposition is blunderbuss tactics - guaranteed to draw popular support for the campaign, but also to open up questions about what is at stake in the anti-bin charges campaign. There are huge issues underlying these events.

Imprisonment of elected representatives is an affront to democracy.

SIPTU says it all

SIPTU, in a statement on the eve of the very large demonstration last week that marched to Mountjoy Jail in support of the anti-bin charge campaign, explaining why the union would be supporting the protest demonstration, said: "We believe that the imposition of these charges is inequitable in practice since they are not applied on the basis of ability to pay." The statement went on: "We believe that it is inequitable in principle, since it fails to recognise that some local authority services (like supply of proper drinking water, sanitation services and domestic refuse collection) are so essential in terms of public health and environmental protect that they should not be treated as commodities which can only be dispensed if the consumer pays an additional charge."

SIPTU goes to the heart of the issue. The provision of these essential services, like clean drinking water, cannot be rationed out on the basis of who can afford to pay.

Water charges next

Not everyone may have noticed that the same day as the government decided to enforce their policy of only collecting the rubbish of those who pay them to do so, John Finnegan, Dublin City Manager, announced for all to hear, that water charges are just around the corner.

And of course the City Manager is exactly right in this. Why? Because the EU obliges governments to charge for water, and of course, because this is conveniently consistent with our PD/Fianna Fáil Coalition government plans - not only to charges for services, via rates, but to privatise the service provision.

Monopoly provision of essential services is extremely good business. You really can't go wrong, especially with the law as your debt collector.

The bin charges are the thick edge of the wedge to introduce the very tax that brought Thatcher down - the poll tax, which makes no differentiation of peoples' relative incomes or ability to pay. Every household (with exception for starters of those on welfare) pays the same. It's a poll tax by any other name. As SIPTU points out, it is inequitable - it's a poll tax.

The poll tax

People in the north of this country already have charges - they call them rates - with some £600 to £700 per annum charged per household. That's undoubtedly where the government intends to go. Bin charges are only the beginning.

The government is going to use 'the law' to establish the fact that everyone has to pay these charges for bin collection for starters. How much the charges will be in the long run is an open-ended story. In some parts of the country they have already reached €300 per household.

But that is not where the issue lies. Once the 'poll tax', service charges, rates, call it what you will, is established, then the heavens open up for the government, anxious as they are to source revenue without putting up tax, closing the endless tax loopholes for their political benefactors, or taxing profits or profiteers.

Privatisation

Once the majority of householders have started to pay, then comes privatisation of the bin services.

With privatisation there won't even be a modicum of democratic accountability of how much householders have to pay, which nominally at least at present remains in the democratic hands of our elected councillors.

As the SIPTU statement says, the provision of an essential service, and the billing thereof, will be in the hands of a large private company, whose services all households have to employ - at whatever the price is 'set' to be.

Incinerators

And who is going to afford to build the incinerator to dispose of trash, which the government has its heart so set on? After all, incinerators don't come cheap, and the government has no way within its growth and stability pact with Europe to go spending multi millions on such a project.

Privatisation squares the circle for the government to get an incinerator, which people don't want, and what's more get the people (through the waste charges/poll tax) will have to pay for it.

Maybe the company that gets the contract for refuse collection in Dublin will also get the contract to build the incinerator, which successive ministers of the Environment, first Dempsey and now Cullen, are most anxious to thrust on the people of the city. They have even marked out the very spot - in Ringsend.

A privatised refuse collection 'service' will find that the exorbitant costs of placing small amounts of trash into incinerators will 'force' them to charge more and more. The long experience of incinerators in the United States suggests they are white elephants, which not only pollute and waste natural resources but cost a leg and an arm to build and keep supplied with waste.

Everything goes up

If refuse collection was first privatised, then the company came along with refuse charges and asked people to pay, and what's more told people that these charges would pay for an incinerator - then no one would pay. The company would go bust.

But as it is, with the collusion and compliance of the councillors, the local authority has imposed bin charges, and there's always the state and the short arm of the law to enforce payment, and once people are paying, the charges can go up and up, and the incinerator can go up too.

Which makes it all the more incomprehensible to then see the General Secretary of the ICTU, David Begg, condemning the anti-bin charges campaign, on the extraordinary ground that it could lead to privatisation! The logic is impenetrable, unless it is 'hit me today and I'll not complain, so you will feel free to hit me tomorrow'.

Strange logic of the ICTU

What David Begg omitted to mention is that already Dublin's bin collection service is partially privatised. Oxygen has the contract to collect the green bins containing paper and tins. And when all waste is recycled, as the City Authority is anxious to tell you will be the case shortly, then all the jobs in the Corpo waste collection service will also be recycled, or in a another word - gone, as fast as the waste pops into the incineration to be wasted and 'recycled' into dioxins and puff.

The campaign against the bin tax is the first major campaign here against privatisation - privatisation of a service which everyone - regardless of income - should have provided free, as before. That's what we pay our taxes for, and these taxes, according to our income, some of us pay as well as we can.

The poll tax taught Mrs Thatcher. Will the bin charges teach Bertie about equitable taxation, and what we expect the government to do in providing the services we all need?

SF motion calls for release of bin charge protesters

In a Dáil motion tabled on Monday, Sinn Féin's five TDs accused the Minister for the Environment and Local Government, Martin Cullen, of implementing policies that have led directly to a situation of confrontation in Dublin and the imprisonment of bin charge protesters. He is also accused of being anti-democratic by depriving elected representatives on local authorities the power to determine waste management policy.

The motion goes on to call for the immediate release of bin charge protesters and demands that the Minister bring forward legislation to amend the Protection of the Environment Act 2003 to ensure that local authorities fulfill their responsibility for public health and safety and provide a refuse collection to all householders.


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