What's the story with skip hire?

Skips are like bouncy castles for grown-ups. All you need to do is plonk one outside your house and watch the neighbours gather. Unlike delighted children lured by bright bounciness, however, the grown-ups don't come running and screaming in daylight but silently, under cover of darkness, junk in hand.

Like bouncy castles, skips should come with a health warning. They cause untold stress from the time they are deposited outside your house to the moment they are hauled away. And by far the most stressful thing isn't paying for it, or even filling it, but keeping enough room in it for your own junk once the neigbourhood has had its turn.

Short of sitting in it with a shotgun there is little that can be done to prevent your €300 investment becoming a magnet for every broken ironing board, knackered vacuum cleaner and clapped-out old telly within a five-street radius.

For many people who would never consider dumping illegally, someone else's skip is impossible to resist. And it doesn't matter if it is already piled higher than Everest - they will just leave a few bits and pieces close to, but not in, your skip. Sure, what harm are they doing? A weird - and incredibly annoying - legislative kink means that you - as the skip hirer - automatically become liable for all the junk in or even near it, as PriceWatch found out recently.

With a bunch of old kitchen units and a large window frame to dispose of, a skip was ordered. It arrived one evening and was partially - and carefully - filled in the twilight hours. Overnight, the neighbours descended and turned it into a mini-landfill.

When they had finished, there wasn't even room for a broken flower pot, never mind the window. Worse was to come when the skip company rang the following day to say they had tried to collect it but couldn't because it was too full. We were told that the contents could not be any higher than a foot (a foot!) over the sides and were brusquely ordered to remove at least a third of the rubbish.

It did not matter a jot to the company whose responsibility the overfill was - it was PriceWatch's problem now. Luckily, as a stand-off was developing, the gods and the Garda intervened. The Irish rugby team were playing England in Croke Park that day and a large, potentially riotous crowd was expected to pass the skip. Fearing it might be burnt out or worse, the Garda insisted the company move it, no matter how full it was, which it did, with very bad grace.

Although it is deeply irritating to suddenly become responsible for other people's rubbish - why don't skips come with some class of lockable lids, for the love of Jesus? - it is hardly surprising that people find it difficult to resist the allure of the empty skip. It is difficult to dispose of certain types of junk any other way.

Time was when a broken ironing board could be left out with the rubbish, but not any more, and bin charges have made skips even more attractive for mean people.

In The Netherlands and Germany, local authorities organise regular junk collection days on which people just leave all the stuff they no longer have any use for outside their houses and apartments.

In a reverse of the Irish situation, students and scavengers descend on the street foraging for furniture. The local authority removes the remaining items and recycles them.

While similar collections are occasionally organised in Irish cities by local authorities, they are rare. A spokesman for Dublin City Council told PriceWatch that they are enormously popular but expensive to organise and, he said, there are problems with rummagers taking junk away only to dump it elsewhere. He said the council considers organising junk collections if residents' associations or councillors ask nicely.

There are some alternatives to the skip. Bring centres can prove to be a remarkably cost-efficient way to get rid of junk - although hardly worthwhile if you just have a broken vacuum cleaner to dispose of.

In recent years, skip bags have become increasingly common for rubble and garden waste that is not enough for a full-sized skip but way too much for the weekly rubbish collection.

Describing itself as a "new cost-effective and hassle free alternative to the traditional skip", BabySkip bags are distributed through a network of retailers and come in two sizes, Midi (1 cubic yard) and Mega (1.8 cubic yards). The bags come flat-packed and can be taken home under your arm. The medium sized bag costs €13.99 while the larger one is €18.50.

Made from heavy-duty fabric, they sit in your front garden waiting to be filled and are less likely to attract flying squads of rubbish dumpers. The price of collection is around €100 for the big bag taking the total to €120 for a 1.8 cubic yard skip.

While this is cheaper than the smallest household skip available, it is not much cheaper and, given the size, may even work out costing you more. Traditional skips come in three sizes - the 2.5 cubic yard mini, the 4 cubic yard midi and the 6 cubic yard standard. A mini skip will set you back €150, a midi costs €200 while the standard builder's skip costs €300.

A reader in search of a bargain skip was prompted to contact both PriceWatch and the Competition Authority last week after he was quoted virtually identical prices from four waste companies in his area. While this does not necessarily mean the companies are fixing their prices - it could simply be a question of the smaller companies matching the prices offered by the market leader - it is certainly enough to raise an eyebrow.

We contacted the Competition Authority to find out the status of our reader's complaint and were told that like all complaints it would go before a screening committee within the next few days and this will decide if it needs to be investigated further.