Illegal dumping has cost County Council €300,000

The amount of money Galway County Council have spent in clean-up operations due to illegal dumping equates to what it would cost to house at least ten families, it has been revealed.

Over the past five years the local authority have forked out more than €300,000 cleaning up rubbish and dead animals that have been dumped illegally, mainly in bogs and in remote rural areas of the county.

But the County Council have said that they have so many vacant properties in need of refurbishment that this money could have easily gone towards accommodating ten families in dire need of housing.

Illegal dumping has become a scourge across Galway in recent years and every time the Council embark on a clean-up, it costs tens of thousands of euro.

A number of years ago Galway County Council admitted spending €100,000 cleaning up illegally dumped refuse in a rural area near Tuam.

A couple of years later in the same Cloonthue area they coughed up another €40,000 as the problem reappeared – albeit to a much smaller scale.

Cllr Pete Roche, who is Chairman of the Joint Policing Committee, is now involved in another clean-up of a bog on the Athenry Road out of Tuam where he says the contents of house renovations along with domestic refuse will fill around 20 large skips.

“It comes up at nearly every JPC meeting but there is nothing that the guards can do. We have installed CCTV cameras in areas, but it still has not solved the problem.

“It is criminal the amount of money being spent because householders have absolutely no regard for where they are dumping their refuse or the costs involved,” Cllr Roche added.

Tens of thousands have been spend on similar operations in the extensive bogs around Ahascragh while the slip roads onto the motorway from the likes of Ballinasloe and Loughrea have become the ‘new dumping grounds’.

A Galway County Council source told the Connacht Tribune that the cost of removing illegally dumped materials from bogs, rural roads and local authority estates over the past five years could easily have refurbished at least ten of their housing stock which currently lie vacant.

At the moment there is a major clean-up operation taking place around two miles from Tuam in a secluded bog area where illegal dumping has been described as being “one of the worst in the county”.

Two diggers on tracks along with a plethora of huge skips have been working on the site, which is accessed by an extremely narrow and secluded dirt path, for the past week removing hundreds of tons of waste that has been deposited there.