Fascinating and depressing piece of the BBC website describing what the effects of the cuts in Greece would be in Britain (I’m using their term; don’t know if it means the UK including NI or not). Well worth a watching to better understand the scale of the attack on the lifestyle of the Greek working class.
Month: February 2012
Waivers and waste collection in SDCC
What a loveable bunch they are down at Greyhound. For news comes that:
Dublin waste firm Greyhound is threatening to charge more than 17,000 waiver customers in south Dublin a full bin collection fee if the council or the Department of Social Protection does not subsidise the service.
Now one could ask as to what the benefit of a privatised waste collection service is if it’s not able to deliver the service that the council was delivering previously. Actually, that’s a good question. And what is the answer?
None that I can see or hear.
Greyhound agreed to provide the bin collection service to waiver customers for an initial 12-month period after South Dublin County Council deducted the cost from the agreed sale price when it sold the business to Greyhound last year.
As the agreement expires at the end of March, the private waste company today warned the council and the Minister for Social Protection that if the cost of the service, estimated at €2.8 million, is not subsidised it would have no other alternative but to charge waiver customers for the service.
Oddly enough neither company nor council mentioned this last March when the ‘purchase’ of SDCC’s waste collection business was unveiled.
Indeed anything but, as according to the Irish Times from that date.
:
The agreement allows the firm to expand its services to more than 70,000 homes in the south Co Dublin area. The company has pledged not to increase waste collection costs in the South Dublin County Council area,
And most importantly that sentence ended:
….and will honour all existing waivers.
Payment methods for consumers are unchanged.
Managing director Brian Buckley said the acquisition “fits perfectly” with Greyhound’s business development strategy.
“We can offer customers greater value for money because we can recycle more of their waste. We send less material to landfill than any other operator in the market, and we believe that our customers should benefit from the higher recycling rates that we achieve.”
Which is odd, in retrospect, because now Mr. Buckley is a lot less chipper.
Greyhound chief executive Michael Buckley said: “We need a resolution. These customers are struggling to survive financially, and they cannot afford to pay for the service. On the other hand we are a private operator and we can not provide an ongoing service free of charge.”
“We are informing our wavier customers in South County Dublin of the situation and are presenting them with a choice of payment plans which are the cheapest in the market.
“These customers are under no obligation to choose our service, and we accept that many simply can not afford to pay for a bin service,” he added.
And he continued:
“Greyhound has been presented with an enormous financial challenge after acquiring two loss making businesses. This is the basis of our pre-paid model. We are confident in our strategy to restore the businesses to profitability while providing customers with the cheapest prices and best service in the market,” said Mr Buckley.
‘Perfect fit’, or ‘enormous financial challenge’. Which one is it?
But this points us right back at SDCC who sold their ‘waste collection business’. Who will collect those bins? Who knows?
Though kudos to Greyhound for a most interesting ‘business development strategy’. Pity the hapless ‘customers’ weren’t told about it earlier.
Meanwhile speaking of Greyhound, here’s a report in the IT from February 2010.
THE FOUR Dublin local authorities have begun action against Greyhound Recycling for its failure to collect green bins from householders across the Dublin region last month.
Dublin City Council served the company with a “performance failure notice” on behalf of the four local authorities late last week for not fulfilling the service requirements in the contract they won from rival waste company Oxygen more than a year ago.
And, here’s one or two FG local representatives who in March 2009 were none too happy with Greyhound’s service in SDCC area.
Fine Gael councillor John Bailey and his daughter, Cllr Maria Bailey, have lodged a motion for the next council meeting, calling on the manager to cancel the contract with Greyhound because of poor service.
“I am appalled at the behaviour of the company over the last five weeks,” he said.
“I have been inundated with complaints and there have been bins everywhere. It’s no way to operate a service.”
And…
Fine Gael councillor Mary Mitchell O’Connor said her bin in Cabinteely was not collected for three weeks.
“I received a calendar setting out when the collection would take place, but it’s a work of fiction as there has been no sign of Greyhound on any of the days indicated,” she said.
Sounds familiar.
The trouble with toner…
It would be wrong not to mention in passing the Aengus Ó Snodaigh toner cartridge story which, on some levels, is highly entertaining. But perhaps not one that he would find that funny.
Best tweet? … word has it AOS is in possession of a hard copy of the internet.
He certainly won’t be the only TD and Senator who it can be fairly said has overused the facilities available or is overusing them. But he’s been caught.
“Excessive” seems charitable when describing industrial level quantities of toner cartridges being used. And what’s inexplicable is that it was thought that none of this would come to light. FOI’s are an handy instrument for the press to unearth some of the ambiguities and worse of life within the Oireachtas. So it was never a case of if this would be examined in the cold light of day, but when.
That in a way is almost as bad as the ‘excessive’ usage in itself. Sure, no crime was committed, no rule broken, but the perception is far from great.
It’s difficult to judge whether this will be a nine-day wonder, or even just a one day wonder. The news of the referendum certainly displaced it fairly rapidly. But it is a chink in the armour of O’Snodaigh, who by any lights is an hard-working representative and fairly clearly to the left within SF.
Long term impacts, if any? Any thoughts?
*pic added by IEL 🙂
Game on…
So, along with the household tax here is another issue to trouble the Coalition – the recognition that yes, despite all the fluff about it being otherwise, the fiscal treaty demands an Irish referendum. And that on the day when S&P announce that Greece is in selective default. Not a great time for the Eurozone, or indeed the Euro, which might account for its slide against the dollar.
Coincidentally, or not, Backroom in the Sunday Business Post this weekend had a number of interesting observations on the latest outcome to the Greek crisis. As s/he notes the Greek deal is simply insufficient unto the scale of the problem that state faces- national debt reaching 168 per cent of GDP next year. And no guarantee that the deal will be accepted by private sector lenders. But Backroom also notes the central aspect of this, that being that…
The EU has failed at every level. It was the EU which pushed the euro project that has turned into such a disaster. A leading German official privately confided to the Financial Times: “It seems to me that we have invented a machine from hell that we cannot turn off.”
In the face of the economic crisis which the euro has unleashed, the EU has repeatedly done too little too late, as it seems to hope that the problem will somehow go away by itself.
The EU Commission has allowed itself to be supplanted by France and Germany which seem now, contrary to EU treaty law, to be directing affairs.
For those who retain a degree of adherence to the European project as a concept and actuality it is that latter aspect which has been so deeply dispiriting. For the two states to assume a position of primus inter pares has mean the effective abandonment of the supposed aims of the Union. This was never meant, at the rhetorical level, to be a union where individual nation states could sideline the Commission and institutions. And even if that were accepted and acceptable, which it is not, there is little evidence that Germany and France have acted beyond their narrow national interests.
And it is this which one suspects is the reason for the bizarre analyses of the crises put forward by those explaining away their actions…
Instead of accepting the truth – that the euro reduced interest rates too much in periphery states and that this led to enormous debt, property and public sector bubbles in those states – the EU has preferred a comforting narrative of sinning spendthrifts on the periphery being rescued by unsullied savers in the core.
What is conveniently forgotten in many analyses is that the EU, and other international organisations such as the IMF and OECD, tended to a panglossian view of what was occurring economically and commercially on their watch in both the individual states and as regards the international regulatory systems during the 2000s.
That said I wonder if the following is entirely correct…
There are huge implications for Ireland’s political parties in the gradual change in the EU’s power, capacity and political attractiveness. With youth unemployment now hovering at around 50 per cent in Spain and Greece, the EU has been transformed from ally to enemy for the young.
In Ireland, the youth unemployment rate is 29 per cent. It is easy to see Ireland’s eurosceptic parties winning support at the expense of pro-EU parties.
Hmmm… Perhaps. They point to SF as capitalising on this attitude, but I don’t – to be honest – see SF as anywhere near as eurosceptic as it was. Euro-critical, surely. And that’s hardly an unusual position in these days. Interesting too how McDowell’s comments recently on new parties seemed to explicitly rule out euro-scepticism. And whether euro-scepticism as an immediate response to the crisis can be translated into a long lasting political strand in the society seems to me to be a very open question. Again, perhaps, but I’d be dubious.
I don’t have a clue what the outcome of the referendum will be, I wonder if our now enviable track record of running referendums twice on issues will make people less risk averse in terms of voting no, if only to discomfit our supposed ‘partners’ in Europe. But either way, good that whatever decision is taken on foot of it will have at least a tinge of democratic legitimation. The genuinely disturbing aspect of this is how unusual that is in some of the states at the centre of the crisis… Italy… Greece…
We were also able to showcase the very best of our agriculture, sport and dance – That Xi Jinping visit from the viewpoint of…
Many thanks to a friend of the Lounge who forwarded this from one…
Joint Statement of the Communist and Workers’ Parties of the 5 Countries with Highest Levels of Unemployment in the EU
“Organization and struggle for stable work with rights. Immediate measures for the unemployed. Struggle for a society without unemployment, exploitation, capitalists. The answer is socialism.”
Worker, Unemployed
The Communist and Workers Parties of the countries of Europe which have been most affected by unemployment Spain, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia and Ireland call on you to struggle and organize.
We address the 24 million “officially” unemployed people in the European Union, particularly the long term unemployed, the unemployed young people and women who are most badly affected.
We address all those who are not recorded in the official statistics, but experience the same nightmare of unemployment.
We address the semi-employed, the agency workers, the workers without social security, those who work in a state of employment by rotation with flexible shifts, with individual contracts, with piece-work contracts, who experience employer intimidation, who face the danger of dismissal and unemployment.
We address those who are forced into unpaid labour under the pretence of opportunities to return to work; those who are deprived of their entitlements to redundancy payments by employers’ pleading “inability to pay”; workers who are on strike and engaged in occupations and sit-ins to protect their jobs and rights.
We also address the farmers who are being wiped out, the small professional and self-employed who have been led to closure by the assault of the monopolies, the anti-people political line of austerity which attacks the working class-popular families.
All of you, as well as every worker today, better understands that this labour “jungle” is spreading and is becoming a general law which, slowly or quickly, big capital, its governments, and the EU seek to impose in every workplace. There is no time to lose.
In the countries where our parties operate, Spain, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia and Ireland unemployment has reached very dangerous levels. The bourgeois class in each country and the predatory alliance of the EU as a whole, have declared war on the working class and the poor popular strata. The capitalist economic crisis brings new measures which smash whatever the anti-people offensive in the previous period had left upright, especially after the Maastricht Treaty.
In this harsh reality, a handful of plutocrats have made fabulous profits. And yet they demand further measures. Their crisis is not a debt crisis, it is a capitalist crisis which came about due to the over-accumulation of capital.
In order to overcome the crisis in favour of capital, the industrialists, the bankers and the other sections of the plutocracy along with their political representatives impose hard measures in order to further reduce the price of labour power and force more people into unemployment.
In this situation the people’s resistance to these harsh measures has been hindered by those elements in the trade union and labour movement who, having long ago accepted the logic and the ideology of capitalism, now plead that there is no alternative but to succumb to the offensive of capital.
The way forward is to win the majority of workers and their families for class based popular struggles on the strategy which promotes their interests. The Communist and Workers parties must be at the heart of this process.
Struggle together with the class-oriented forces, together with the Communist and Workers parties.
Organize in your unions and workplaces. Contribute to the development of activity. In this direction the strength of the working class can be reinforced.
Demand immediate measures for the protection of the unemployed:
Decent unemployment benefit for all the unemployed.
Comprehensive medical pharmaceutical healthcare and social security protection.
Freezing of their loans and mortgages.
Unemployment is not a natural phenomenon. It is bred by the capitalist system which is characterized by the anarchy in production, by exploitation.
Only a socialist economy, that is to say a centrally planned economy that will be based on workers’ power and the socialized means of production can guarantee the right to work for all.
This is what happened in the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries and it is a historical achievement and one of the many accomplishments of the socialist countries.
Our parties call you to struggle every day, to struggle for the abolition of the exploitation of man by man, for a society without unemployment, for socialism which can satisfy the needs of the people.
The Parties:
Communist Party of Greece
Communist Party of Ireland
Workers Party of Ireland
Socialist Party of Latvia
Socialist People’s Front of Lithuania
Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
That Poll , The Household Charge and Anti Household Charge Posters on poles
A snotty little attack on the Household Charges Campaign
Cllr Richard Humphreys, the Labour Party Councillor for the Stillorgan Ward, has criticised the poster campaign by the “Campaign against the Household and Water Taxes”.
“Posters advocating non-payment of the household charge have begun to appear on poles around the County, urging people not to register or pay. There is something ironic if not ridiculous about the fact that the Anti-Charge campaign is using poles paid for by Council money and maintained by the Council in order to advocate non-payment of lawful charges to fund essential local government services.” Humphreys said.
After continues along the same lines and how its FF and The Greens fault we have the charge before finishing with ..
“It is also somewhat striking that the “Campaign against the Household and Water Taxes” is a somewhat shadowy organisation which does not list its members or committee conspicuously on its website. Nor does it publish on its website any rules or constitution which would show that its committee is accountable to its members. Its press releases are featured on a Socialist Party website and it gives every impression of being another vehicle for the cynical politics of the Ultra-Left Alliance.”
Shadowy?
As for the posters on poles argument … does he really think that the money raised will go to local services?
And speaking of the household tax, the detailed findings of that Sunday Times Behaviours and Attitudes poll are now online , all 73 pages of them.
Amongst the information and one that I missed in the paper was
Respondents were asked in today’s poll, whether they, or anyone else in their household, has already paid the €100 household charge.
This question was asked of all eligible voters aged 18 years+ and, by definition, would include some younger members of households who are likely to be unaware as to whether the head of household has or has not paid the charge.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the vast majority of Irish households have yet to pay the household charge.
Indeed, just one in ten of all Irish adults aged 18 years+ claim that either they or somebody else in the home has by now paid the charge – rising to just 1 in 8 of those aged 55+ years. This leaves a massive proportion of Irish households who, as of the end of February at least, have yet to pay the household charge.
Of most interest, however, is the fact that over a third of all of those voters living in households which have not yet paid the charge claim that they do not intend to do so.
44% state that they do intend to pay it, with a further 20% undecided.
I may be wrong but the Anti Household Tax movement hasn’t got the same coverage as the Septic Tanks. That said Nationwide Household Tax protests were covered on Saturdays RTE television news. They finished the report by saying that 120,000 households had registered so far. … No mention that it was ‘just’ 120,000 out of 1.7 million households.
Now another little bugbear here (and elsewhere) has been the constant lack of measurement in polls for the ULA or at least more than one of its parts.
This is the question asked about party support. The Workers Party are there but no ULA, no Socialist Party, no People Before Profit Alliance, no WUAG etc etc
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
