What's driving the bin protests? Is it just political jockeying ahead of next year's local elections, or are people fed up with 'double taxes', asks Kathy Sheridan
When the dust settles in the bin wars, the waivers may prove to be the dog that didn't bark. Last May, as the clock ticked down to Minister for the Environment, Martin Cullen's legislation permitting local authorities to levy bin charges, Fingal County Council suddenly woke up to the fact that 90 per cent of waiver applications were emanating from the rather chi-chi suburbs of Howth and Malahide. As waivers were designed for the financially vulnerable - the elderly, those on social welfare or earning below a taxable income - this seemed odd.
In an electoral area comprising such working class redoubts as Corduff, Hartstown, Sheepmoor and Mulhuddart, this was odd. Very odd indeed in the context of a campaign described by Diarmuid Naessens, treasurer of the Dublin City Campaign against the Bin Charges (DCCBC), as "a war of the working class".
The suspicion in the Fingal authority was that the area's politicians - the names of Socialist Party (SP) leader, Joe Higgins, and his Socialist Party replacement on Fingal council, Ruth Coppinger, spring readily to lips - were not straining themselves to get the message of the waivers across to those most in need of it. So a full-page advertisement was placed in the Community Voice. Within two weeks, 1,000 waiver applications had come in, the majority from predominantly working class areas.
Since then, waivers have climbed to include 13 per cent of Fingal households. Dublin City Council's figure is around 20 per cent. Nonetheless, last week, one of the grounds on which SIPTU general president, Jack O'Connor, condemned the bin charge as "unjustifiable" was that "it disregards the principle of ability to pay". At anti-bin charge meetings, where waivers are mentioned at all, they are clearly not seen as a good thing. "Waivers are designed to divide and rule", declared Chekhov Feeney, while chairing an anti-bin charge meeting in Dublin's north city.
This week, the Evening Herald reported that Anna Doran, a part-time cleaner from Finglas who was jailed for two weeks, was one of several protesters who had received waivers. Her husband said that this made no difference: "This is about a principle".
But surely, by applying for a waiver, such people conceded the principle of bin charges? John McCamley, a bus driver, who is on the Dublin city anti-bin tax campaign steering committee and one of the three involved in the lorry incident in which one protester was injured this week, can't see the point.
"They still want to fight the erosion of the public service. We've a lot of people who applied for waivers but that shouldn't stop them protesting. We have members who actually paid the bin tax because they were terrified and intimidated by letters from the council threatening the Sheriff's office on them."
But Progressive Democrat councillor, Tom Morrissey alleges the intimidation is on the other side. "Some people now feel intimidated not to pay the charge" and some residents might feel it was wrong to apply for a waiver, he says.
As organisers continue to claim that they represent the vast majority of working-class people in this campaign, the problem they face is of public perception. A 14,000-strong poll for the Marian Finucane show during the week, found that three-quarters of them support bin charges. As well as that, a number of planned "massive" demonstrations have failed to materialise. Two such marches to Mountjoy Prison mustered barely 2,000, although in one case, it included cross-over protesters from a Reclaim the Streets demonstration.
Some observers believe it was a dearth of protesters that led to the sudden calling off of the bin depot blockades on Wednesday. Nonetheless, John McCamley claims that in Finglas, the movement has "a couple of thousand paid-up members" and that meetings over three years have attracted "average" attendances of 600 to 700.
Some locals dispute that. There is also a widespread perception that the entire campaign has been driven by the Socialist Party or hard left, with Sinn Féin in a secondary role, with a view to next year's local elections. The general secretary of the ICTU, David Begg, has accused the campaigners of "leading ordinary working people into a cul-de-sac of imprisonment in pursuit of a political objective".
Three of the 11 anti-bin charge protesters who appeared before the High Court on September 23rd for blockading lorries in Fingal, are members of the SP; Alan Lee, secretary of the party's Limerick branch, Paul Murphy of Dublin south city, and John Daniel of Ballyfermot. A fourth member, Mathew Wayne, was summonsed to the District Court on a separate charge the next day.
Jean Sherwin, a Blakestown resident, and a Fingal campaigner, criticised the county council for depicting the protesters as "pawns" of the Socialist Party. "They [the party\] are helping to guide us. But I am not a member of the party. Nor are most of the people out on the streets."
Nonetheless, few on the ground in Fingal would dispute that the campaign has been spearheaded by Socialist Party councillors, Clare Daly and Ruth Coppinger, Fiona O'Loughlin, who works for the SP leader, Joe Higgins and Michael Murphy, husband of Clare Daly. It was Murphy and O'Loughlin who were accused by Fingal county manager, Willie Soffe, of intimidating a bin collector during the week, by visiting him in his home, although they say it was a case of mistaken identity.
John McCamley is also an SP member, although he claims to be one of only two in the Finglas area. "The Finglas organising committee includes myself, a girl called Helen who is Socialist Party and Dessie Ellis of Sinn Féin." The organising committee also includes an ex-member of Democratic Left, a former member of the Workers' Party, and two other people who are still in jail as a result of anti-bin charge protests. "A lot of former Labour supporters are members of the campaign - that's what Labour should be worried about."
According to McCamley, the lorry blockade has been organised entirely by local people. "Where the truck was blocked and nine people ended up in jail - we knew nothing about it until they asked us for advice because the police were on the way." Yet he describes that incident as the one that entitles Finglas to call itself "the first to launch - one of the homes of the anti-bin \ campaign."
The ground has also been shifting around the protesters' bin charge arguments. The emphasis now is on "privatisation".
"The Government and councils are legislating to privatise certain services. And to make them attractive, you need to make them profitable, so the bin tax is a disguise to make them attractive to private companies," says McCamley.
There are repeated references to the triumph over water charges. "That battle was won in the mid-1990s in Dublin and in campaigns around the country. We knew that once they brought in this tax, the tax would go up, the service would be privatised and move out of local authority hands. Calling it an 'environmental tax' is just a ploy to get people to pay it. The basic battle here is the defence of public services, to prevent privatisation. That's where this is going."
"Double taxation" remains a feature of the protest, however, although a call to the Revenue reveals that this is tax deductible at the standard rate (worth around €30 if you're a €25,000 a year earner in the Dublin city or Fingal areas). The double taxation argument is not one John Fitzgerald, Dublin City manager, has much time for. "That argument has been made for 25 years. The Berlin Wall has come down, the Soviet Union has gone and the tax regime has changed. The monies we're levying now are not for picking up the bin; the real cost is for something that didn't apply 25 yearsago. Back then we had waste disposal sites in places like Dunsink, it was easy and cheap. No one knew that the city would grow to this extent and the amount of waste with it."
Nowadays of course, Dublin sends its waste all the way to Co Kildare (council bin charge: €338) where the Kill landfill will reach capacity in four years. Meanwhile, replacement sites earmarked at Kilternan and Ballycorus in south county Dublin and two in the north county, have attracted such hostility from surrounding communities that local authority officials have had difficulty gaining access to the sites. It takes six to seven years to bring a site on stream. Councils are not exaggerating when they say in four years, Dublin will be "on a knife edge".
Nonetheless, the campaigners believe they are right to chant about democratic deficits, right to fear privatisation, right to fear a charge which is apt to soar, year on year.
Now that these service charge decisions have been handed over to local authority management, rather than the elected members, protesters believe they have no power any more. "It's them who are being undemocratic," says McCamley.
The Dublin city manager's reply is: "Every single charge in existence was agreed by all the councils and the legislation that gave rise to the charges was passed by the Oireachtas. That's where their argument lies."
As for the rest, there are grounds for concern. While Dublin City Council levies just €156 (the cheapest by far in the country), the charge in Athlone is €416.
Meanwhile, more than half of county councils and town councils have privatised their refuse collections. Meath County Council, among the first to privatise in 1990, has said the main reason was the non-payment of bin charges.
This is the stick being waved by Dublin local authorities: "These protests are a way of setting us up for privatisation," says John Fitzgerald. "But I've always made it clear that privatisation is not on the agenda as long as our service is doing its job well and competitively, which it is and has been doing for generations. Three years ago when it was suggested at council, I recommended against it." As for the threat of rising charges, Dublin City Council agrees that the economic charge would be more than €300 a year. But it argues its charges could never reach the wild heights claimed by protesters simply because the market wouldn't bear it; the private refuse companies would move in, as they have elsewhere. It also rejects the much-repeated argument that householders contribute only 1.5 per cent of all waste. According to EPA figures, more than half of all municipal waste, nationally, is household. The other half comes from commercial premises.
Although householders contribute €16 million to the city council's waste disposal kitty, compared with just €10 million from the commercial side, the council notes that it processes only 25,000 tonnes of commercial waste (the rest is processed privately), compared with 170,000 tonnes for households. Also commercial properties "are paying the full economic cost, as well as rates", according to the council.
After all that, however, anyone who has talked to "ordinary" protesters, soon discovers that while many of the arguments are trotted out almost as a chant, the real problem is a deeper and more vague malaise. "I'm just sick of the way the country is run, sick of being got at on every side. We're the highest taxed people in Europe," said a woman on the picket line this week.
But "double taxation", as in "we're the highest taxed people in Europe", turns out to mean, not income tax, but the "stealth taxes" such as road tax and VRT, of recent years, which in the words of Terry Maye (32), an airport worker, SIPTU member, father of three and mortgage holder, mean "you're a prisoner in your own home, you haven't the money to go out and enjoy yourself".
A Fianna Fáil supporter all his life, voting for them last time out, Maye now sees the point of the Socialist Party. "I never took much notice of them till the bin tax came along . . ." He is deeply distrustful now of Government.
John McCamley agrees that the protest is "a bit about the bin tax, a bit about a lot of other things . . . People are really pissed off. The bin tax has just pushed them that bit further over the edge."