Council prepared to take court action again

Dublin City manager, Mr John Fitzgerald, has said the city council is quite prepared to go to court again should the need arise to ensure bin collection services.

This is despite a call yesterday from the Irish Congress of Trade Unions call for a two-week moratorium on bringing protesters to court.

Mr Fitzgerald said he believed the anti-bin charge protesters were a "small unrepresentative group with a separate political agenda" and that they should "just go away". Mr Fitzgerald said the description of the bin charge as double taxation was incorrect as modern waste management with its vast recycling infrastructure was not there previously.

The charge was for something new and was "ring-fenced" to provide recycling facilities, recovery and sorting centres, bring centres, educational facilities and collection facilities, among others.

But Mr Fitzgerald said it was still "nowhere near enough" and the bin charges did not cover the full cost of the management of waste.

Suggesting that there were many positive things the "undemocratic political activists" could do for their communities, Mr Fitzgerald compared the group to those who insisted the world was flat.

"These people only represent themselves and the solution to this is that these people just go away . . . These people are pursuing a narrow political agenda but they are a group without any mandate."