Dublin City councillors have narrowly voted in favour of a Fianna Fail motion to introduce service charges for refuse collection across the city. The vote was 25 to 22 in favour.
Collection charges of £95, as opposed to £150, for those households where a wheelie bin will be provided with a charge of £65 where providing a bin to a capacity of 240 litres is not practical.
Low income households and people receiving social welfare payments along with pensioners will be entitled to full or partial waivers depending on their circumstances. On this note Cllr Michael Mulcahy called on the city manager Mr John Fitzgerald to introduce a thorough information service to counter what he called the "rampant confusion" among people as to what the charges actually meant.
Tonight’s vote came after the Minister for the Environment had placed a deadline on the council to adopt the Budget estimates for 2001 in which the issue of service charges had proved highly contentious.
Mr Dempsey was accused of "blackmail" and "holding the council to ransom" over the deadline. Independent councillor Mr Finian McGrath said the refuse charges amounted to a form of double taxation on ordinary PAYE workers. He said there were other ways of raising funds citing the owners of 34 per cent of inner city buildings which he claimed were not paying commercial rates.
He told Mr Dempsey’s colleagues to tell the Minister: "If you abolish the city council you will go down in history like Maggie Thatcher after she abolished the GLCs".
The city manager said that the charges were necessary and were not simply about providing wheelie bins, but were part of the council’s targets to recycle 60 per cent of its waste.