Appalling – that’s how a local councillor’s sums up overnight dumping in North Kilkenny.
Cllr Mary Hilda Cavanagh drove to the scene at Knockshinraw and had to reverse about a quarter of a mile around narrow bends to get out of the area as the route was blocked by the items.
The haul includes bits of broken timber, children’s toys, household rubbish and more.
Cllr Cavanagh says “At some hour during the night, somebody with a car and trailer or a jeep and trailer dumped two very big, what I think are half tonne skip bags of rubbish down onto the road, they obviously had a strap tied around the two bags then they tied it to a cement block that’s there to block a gateway that’s going into a forestry area and then they drove off and down fell the two bags onto the road and my God it’s just appaling”.
She doesn’t believe there’s enough of a deterrent for such activity, saying “I think you should get a jail sentence if you’re caught for something like that, nothing less than a jail sentence and I also think your name should be on the front of the Kilkenny People and one of the headlines on the news, because that’s the only way you stop people, just fining people a couple hundred euro sure that’s nothing to people”.
And Cllr Cavanagh promises that this incident, in particular, will be followed up, noting “The council’s environment section will trawl through it and see can they get any evidence of any description on anybody and also I think at this stage cameras will have to be put up at the ends of roads, I know it might impinge on all of us like if we’re going home at 4 o’clock in the morning we’ll be seen, but so what if we are, if we’re just going about our business in our cars, but I think that the only way that you’ll find out who did that was to have a camera that picked up the number of the vehicle that drove it”.
