Taoiseach admits bin fees to rise for some

LEO Varadkar has said there is no reason for homeowners to be ‘panicked or fearful’, despite acknowledging that the State’s decision to abolish flat-rate bin charges will lead to higher bin bills for some people.

The Taoiseach insisted that the ending of fixed-fee bin collection ‘makes sense for all the obvious environmental reasons’.

However, Environment Minister Denis Naughten has admitted that there is nothing the State can do to stop bin companies raising their charges.

The Government says one of the main reasons it has abolished the flat-rate bin charge – which about 50% of households pay – is because the country is running out of landfill space into which black bin rubbish is dumped. The new scheme follows the abandonment of the universal pay-by-weight system last December after it met severe public resistance, including a campaign by the Irish Daily Mail.

Under the new plan, householders will either be offered pay-by-weight or pay-by-lift, with flat fees being phased out. More brown bins will be distributed to encourage the separate disposal of compost waste.

And the 60,000-plus people who need to dump incontinence pads in their bins will each receive a €75 ‘annual support’ to help them meet the average cost of disposal.

While most waste companies have so far declined to comment on whether they plan to increase their charges, one firm, AES, texted customers yesterday to say: ‘Dear customer, further to the minister’s announcement, we can confirm there are no changes to your current service or your (next) invoice.’

Yesterday, Mr Varadkar told the Dáil: ‘If people pay a flat fee, they do not have any incentive to reduce the amount of rubbish they throw away, recycle, compost or reuse.’

Earlier, Environment Minister Mr Naughten was asked on RTÉ if firms could charge whatever they want. He replied: ‘It is an open market. That is up to them as to what they charge.’ But he suggested that competition in the market among the 67 waste companies would play a factor in making sure charges did not go through the roof.

THAT Michael Devereaux and his wife Kathleen were separated by a nursing home selection procedure in such a cavalier and uncaring manner was, of course, appalling and, as Leo Varadkar rightly said when the issue came to light this week, ‘inhumane’.

After all, the Wexford couple have been inseparable since their wedding day 63 years ago. Indeed, in the same year that Michael and his young bride Kathleen tied the knot, Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, Bill Haley hit the big time with Rock Around The Clock and athlete Roger Bannister broke the fourminute mile.

Here at home, meanwhile, John A Costello ousted Dev as taoiseach, the Evening Press newspaper hit the newsstands of Dublin for the first time and a writer called Brendan Behan had a play called The Quare Fellow premiere to great acclaim in Dublin’s Pike theatre.

So yes, it’s a long time since Michael and Kathleen Devereaux became a married couple, committing themselves to each other ‘for richer, for poorer’ and, most pertinently in the current circumstances, ‘in sickness and in health’.

Heartbreaking

For a couple to be separated after a lifetime together doesn’t bear thinking about. Had one of them died, that would, of course, have been heartbreaking. But there would have been a reason for the separation. For each of them to know, however, that the other one was only up the road but that they could not be together must have been such a difficult cross for them to bear.

My own parents had been married for 72 years when my father died in August 2015. He was 94 at the time. My mother, who has just recently reached the great age of 97, still aches for his presence every day of her life. But there was a four-month period leading up to my father’s death that was absolute purgatory for her.

First, he was in hospital. Then he had to move to a nursing home. She could visit him there but she couldn’t stay with him. She wanted to be with him all day, every day – and he with her – but circumstances meant that wasn’t possible.

They were both utterly heartbroken and it was the first time that I really saw my parents as the very elderly human beings that they were. In their long and active lives, nothing had ever diminished them before.

Now, however, with my father in the nursing home, my mother vacated the family home, taking an apartment in an ‘assisted-living’ facility on the same site as my father’s nursing home.

Why? Because she could see his window from her window and it was only about 100 metres from her door to his.

So she spent the last ten weeks of my father’s life (during which time she herself turned 95) walking over and back and over and back from her ‘home’ to his to spend the day with him, only leaving to return to her own apartment at meal times.

It wasn’t a solution – he wasn’t ever coming home with her – but it was some consolation in very difficult circumstances.

But apart from the great distress and sadness that such a separation brought to my parents’ lives for those short, few months, there is another aspect to this. And it’s an important one. My mother sorted it. Not perfectly. But however great was the trauma of leaving her family home, she did it, so that she could be closer to her husband. She was, and remains, extraordinarily resilient.

Robust

As, it appears, is Michael Devereaux. Yes, to listen to the clip from RTÉ’s Liveline when he told his story, his voice breaking as he talked about himself and his beloved Kathleen, would break your heart.

But how many actual people do you know who have taken to the national airwaves in an attempt to right a wrong, to get their story out there, to seek a solution to a problem that is overwhelming them? One? Two? None? Exactly.

And yet here was a 90-year-old man speaking out on radio because he knew that what was happening to him was wrong. He took the bull by the horns and he sorted it.

Old people can be incredibly robust. And smart. And strong. And most of the time we don’t give them half enough credit. We patronise them, we mollycoddle them, we dismiss their views and their concerns.

Yet when I see an elderly man on a street, perhaps using a ‘walker’ to assist his mobility, or an old gentleman in a queue in a supermarket, painstakingly counting out the required amount of money, I often smile to myself.

Years ago, when I was talking to a friend about old age and how it must be difficult to come to terms with, not so much yourself, but in terms of how you know others must perceive you, he nodded his head in agreement.

‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘We walk around the streets and we see all these old men and we so often dismiss them as just old duffers… And we don’t for a moment take into account what they might have done in their earlier lives – like fight against Hitler.

‘Old men, just walking around, who have seen things and done things that our generation would run a mile from. We just wouldn’t have the guts or the resilience.’

Character

How right he was. And all these years later his comments that day have stayed with me. Which is why I often smile to myself when I see some young one trying to speed up an elderly person at a till or someone trying to explain something to an old lady as if she was a child, only to be met with a withering look and an all-tooknowing sigh.

Physical frailty is one thing. But strength of character and depth of experience are quite another. My mother’s arthritis now means that she has – finally – resorted to a walking aid.

But she doesn’t need help to still form her opinions or to check her bank statements or to choose what she wants to eat in a restaurant or to let you know exactly what she thinks of Sinn Féin or Theresa May or the Lions’ performance against the All Blacks.

Yes, she is lucky to have reached her great age with her faculties still intact. But she is 97. Just look at how we dismiss ‘old people’ who are still in their seventies and eighties.

And just look at how we want to pension people off, force retirement upon them when they are still sprightly of both mind and body.

‘An aged man is but a paltry thing…’ wrote WB Yeats in Sailing To Byzantium. ‘Unless soul clap its hands and sing…’

Well, there’s nothing paltry about Michael Devereaux. When the going got tough he knew exactly how to clap his hands and sing.

The thing is, though, when it comes to the voices of the elderly, the rest of us need to do more listening.