Conor Walsh

This area was serviced by one company under a contract.

Seven trucks came down the street on a Saturday morning for two hours.

Now, half of them were doing one side and half of them were doing the other side.

So, you know, the efficiency can go out of it.

Yeah, exactly.

But the fact that there were seven was incredible, I felt, all from the one company.

So, look, you know, what the court decided 15 years ago was that monopolies are inherently inefficient.

And when you start putting monopolies in place, they become very inefficient.

Yeah, there's competition at the start.

But once you win the tender, it's very, very hard to remove you.

And particularly if the council doesn't have control of the transfer stations and the bins, they can't remove you.

So they need to get control of all that.

And then they can remove you.

But at the end of the day, if you're best placed there, you're very, very hard to remove.

And look, there are 40 companies collecting household waste now.

Only 12 of them are big enough to win a county contract.

OK, so you're going to lose 28 companies immediately if we go to a 10 drain system.

Those 28 companies are running around the back roads of Ireland collecting waste, collecting...

collecting skips, servicing manufacturing facilities, servicing commercial premises, servicing households, and sometimes with the same truck, serving offices and houses and various things.

You know, you lose all those synergies.