The elected members of Mayo County Council this week hit out at the decision by the council executive to close the two civic amenity sites at Derrinumera and Rathroeen at 1pm on Saturdays.
Castlebar Independent councillor Michael Kilcoyne raised the issue at Monday’s council meeting saying, “a few years ago it was free to recycle at these sites, then there was a charge introduced, and then it was put up again. Now people can’t used the facilities on a Saturday afternoon which is the only time a lot of people would be able to get to them. The reduction of hours at these sites is unacceptable, I’m calling on the manager to open the sites up again on Saturday afternoons. It is just not good enough.”
Cllr Kilcoyne’s stance on the issue was supported cross party in the chamber. Cllr Frank Durcan said that he has had more complaints on this issue in the past number of weeks than he had on any other issue in 43 years of being an elected councillor. Fine Gael councillor Patsy O’Brien called for common sense to be used. He said the council has to spend a lot of money on clearing up illegal dumping, and the early closing will probably add to this, increasing in the future and cost more money in the long run. Fianna Fáil councillor Blackie Gavin told the meeting, “Over 30 bags of rubbish was collected by the community in Keelogues last weekend in a clean up of the area and this will only lead to more being dumped.”
Ballina based Independent councillor Gerry Ginty added, “Sometimes I don’t know if we are serious at all about these things, some people are going to illegally dump rubbish that’s just a fact, but by doing this we are just going to encourage even more of it.”
Director of services for Mayo County Council, Seamus Granahan, explained the reasoning for the early closure to the elected members. “The sites are open from 8am to 1pm on Saturdays, the early closure is based on economic grounds,” he said. “We have a €200,000 short fall in the budget for this area in 2010 and we have had to make cuts. The civic amenity sites are expensive to run and recycling was never free, there was always a cost to it. By reducing the opening hours we were able to take €80,000 out of the shortfall. It is an operational decision, we all have budgets that we have to stick within, our policy is to provide the best services within our resources and we are trying to do this.”
Mr Granahan’s stance was backed up by acting county manager Joe Beirne. “It’s purely an economic and financial decision,” he said. “Since we pulled out of waste collection this has been a loss making venture for the council, but we’ve still done our best to keep these sites open. Next year is going to be an even harder year, you all accepted a budget and were aware of the financial constraints at the time.”
