Call to ‘name and shame’ fly-tippers

THE scale of illegal dumping across the north Cork area has been brought sharply into focus after it emerged Cork County Council received 79 complaints of ‘fly-tipping’ in the first quarter of this year alone.

This resulted in council staff having to undertake clean-up operations at 51 sites across both the Fermoy and Kanturk/Mallow municipal districts between January and the end of March.

The figures were revealed to councillors at this week’s May northern area committee meeting by Sharon Corcoran, director of the council’s environment directorate.

Ms Corcoran said that between the end of March and mid-May the council had received a further 83 complaints of fly-tipping at locations across north Cork.

She said that a specially commission clean-up truck purchased by the authority to monitor fly-tipping after the authority announced it was to reduce opening hours at its 11 civic amenity sites had been called in to clean up 54 of these locations.

“The van that serves the north Cork area only operates for two days a week, so in effect it has only been on the road for 12-days between the start of April and mid-May,” said Ms Corcoran.

“During that time it collected 2.18 tonnes of illegally discarded rubbish. This would indicate there is clearly a major problem with fly-tipping, not just in north Cork but across the whole county,” she added.

Her comments prompted a call by Cllr Noel McCarthy (Lab) for the council to take a more aggressive stance against fly-tippers by erecting CCTV cameras at known dumping blackspots.

“By doing this we can identify persistent offenders and ‘name and shame’ them by prosecuting them through the courts. This is the only way to teach people that this kind of behaviour is totally unacceptable,” he said.

While Cllr McCarthy said the cleanup trucks were a good idea, tidying up the mess left by illegal dumping was not the solution to the problem.

“If people know the rubbish is going to be cleaned up without any further action being taken they will only do it again. There needs to be a deterrent and even a couple of prosecutions would get the message across that this will not be tolerated,” he said.

His comments received the widespread support of committee members, with Cllr Dan Joe Fitzgerald (FF) saying it was unfair to expect the council and people from local communities across the region to clean up other people mess.

“We can’t make it easy for people to fly-tip and it is my belief that using CCTV footage to prosecute people is the way to go,” he said.

Cllr John Paul O’Shea (Ind) said funding for CCTV systems may be available through the council’s town development fund initiative.

Ms Corcoran said that council staff will go through the rubbish they collect to find incriminating evidence, but this often proves fruitless.

“People are clever and tend not to dump items that could incriminate themselves,” she said.

“However, we are in the process of identifying dumping blackspots. Once we have an informed break down of where they are will do all within our power to address the problem, including the use of CCTV where there is a persistent problem,” she pledged.