It’s the councillors’ latest move in a years-long campaign to stop council managers from reducing services at the centre.
Local councillors have called for the council to take over running the North Strand Recycling Centre in Shamrock Terrace, which is currently run by a private waste-management company, Panda.
It’s the councillors’ latest move in a years-long campaign to stop council managers from reducing services at the centre, where people can drop off everything from cardboard and plastic bottles to fluorescent tubes and refrigerators six days a week.
In 2022, councillors campaigned against plans to pare back services there, and following a stream of council motions, council officials said they were reviewing the idea.
But councillors suspect there’s a new plan. So on Tuesday 12 March, at a meeting of their Central Area Committee, they backed another motion, this time saying that the council should take over running the centre itself and employ the staff directly.
The council shouldn’t sign another contract with the company that runs the centre and the staff should become permanent employees of the council, said independent Councillor Nial Ring in his motion.
The uncertainty isn’t fair on the workers, he said. “They can’t go on the way they are, not knowing whether they are going to be employed,” said Ring.
Panda hasn’t yet responded to queries submitted Tuesday afternoon about the nature of employment contracts for its workers.
Dublin City Council also operates a maintenance depot from the site, meaning it is a base for cleaning staff, road maintenance workers, and caretakers.
Councillors on the Central Area Committee also backed an addition to the motion, proposed by Fine Gael Councillor Ray McAdam, that councillors would use a legal instrument to force the council to take on the workers if need be.
(This would require the backing of the full council, and there to be the money for it.)
A written response to Ring’s motion from Sid Daly, a public domain officer, said that the council had carried out a feasibility study and cost-benefit analysis “regarding the potential insourcing of the operation of civic amenity sites” and is discussing the matter with its human resources department.
Officially, there are no changes planned to the recycling services at North Strand, but councillors are sceptical. “It’s not all adding up,” says McAdam. “There is a red flag going up.”
Green Party Councillor Janet Horner said that the recycling centre is really well used. Many local residents don’t have cars, and some bring all their rubbish to the centre as they’ve no space for bins, she said.
In March 2022, Ring, the independent councillor, tabled an emergency motion at the Central Area Committee, rejecting “any plan to close or downgrade the recycling centre at Shamrock Cottages, North Strand”.
Ring tabled another motion to the area committee in May 2022 calling for a review of recycling services in the north inner-city and for all recycling services to be retained.
He called on the council area manager “to give an unequivocal statement that the centre will not only remain open but that a review thereof will be immediately undertaken with a view to enhancing the centre and the excellent recycling facilities it offers to the area”.
Instead the council response said: “Waste Management Services are currently considering the best future use of the Shamrock Terrace site in order to continue to provide essential recycling services to the local community.”
Then at the Central Area Committee meeting in July 2022, Ring tabled another motion, and Joe Costello, who was a Labour councillor at the time, did too.
Costello looked for a report on both the Shamrock recycling centre and the Grangegorman recycling facility.
All the members of the Central Area Committee signed Ring’s emergency motion, which called on the council to retain the Shamrock centre in full.
In September 2022 Ring brought up the issue again at the full council meeting, listing all his previous motions, citing the unanimous support of the Central Area Committee and seeking assurances that the centre wasn’t being downsized. “The future status of the centre is still unclear,” he said.
The council’s response to Ring at the time said that: “In light of the concerns expressed by local Councillors, the decision to reduce the level of recycling services provided at Shamrock Terrace Recycling Centre is being reviewed.”
At that same meeting though, a different response issued to a query from Green Party Councillor Caroline Conroy.
Senior managers in the Waste Management Services division of the council had seen the new super depot in Ballymun as an opportunity to use the site at Shamrock Terrace and Aldborough Parade differently, it said, “to better provide essential operational services in the city centre in terms of street cleaning.”
They had decided in 2018 to shrink the recycling centre at Shamrock Terrace to expand Alborough Parade depot next door, it said. “This will allow for the storage of increased fleet and to eliminate unnecessary travel time between Ballymun and the City Centre.”
Given depot closures elsewhere, waste management services needed to better use the Aldborough Parade depot “to ensure the continued delivery of essential street cleaning services in the city centre”, it said.
“While there will be a reduction in the number of services available at Shamrock Terrace as a result – waste streams such as bulky waste and large WEEE items such as white goods and flat screen TVs that by definition require to be transported by car or van – this will reduce traffic flow into the site,” it said.
A suite of bring centre waste streams would be available at the repurposed bring centre, it said, citing mixed dry recyclables, small household electronics, and garden waste.
Councillors kept bringing motions on the issue because staff working in the facility told them there were changes coming, says McAdam, the Fine Gael councillor, who was chair of the Central Area Committee in 2022.
But the council’s official responses at first said there were no changes planned. “Initially it was nothing to see here,” says McAdam.
Councillors thought that response issued to Ring in September 2022 was the end of the issue, he says. “We thought it was done and dusted.”
More recently, though, the council carried out a feasibility study and cost-benefit analysis looking at potentially taking the recycling centres back into council operations, says McAdam, but the councillors can’t get sight of that report.
“Why is the information not being shared with councillors?” he says.
At Tuesday’s meeting, McAdam said he wanted the existing staff to be employees of Dublin City Council and that councillors could use a legal instrument, known as section 140, to force the issue.
“We reserve the right to consider using section 140 of the Local Government Act to ensure that this facility continues to be managed and the staff employed by Dublin City Council,” said McAdam at the meeting.
Section 140 is a provision that lets the elected councillors compel the council executive to do something.
Central Area Councillors had previously said that they would use it if necessary to stop a reduction in recycling services at Grangegorman, but that would take a vote in favour from the full council.
Councillors in general have been reluctant to use that power. And, even if a councillor could get the votes to pass a Section 140 resolution, the council executive might then find that either they didn’t have the money to do whatever was ordered, or could not legally do it.
McAdam said there is an illegal-dumping emergency in the north inner-city. “We’ve seen how much demand there is for these services, we have to maintain them and protect them.”
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