Tag: County Council

A note to Ashefield residents

Folks, you should all have received the note below from the residents association by now, or over the next couple of days. If you’ve found ashefield.com from that note, welcome! – hope you find this site useful. Contact the site at info [at] ashefield.com if you have any news, photos of the area, or would like to add your service details if you’re a resident.

It is lovely to see the end of the cold weather and nice that the bright evenings are kicking in. With Spring in the air, we would like to remind residents that the grass cutting season will soon be here.

As you may know, since the county council took over our estate some years ago from the developer, Billy Connolly, it is now the responsibility of us, the residents, to look after the common areas within the estate.

To enable and assist in the maintenance and general upkeep of these areas, the residents association is once again asking for a contribution of €30 from each household towards these costs.

Collectors will call shortly to all houses in Ashefield and it would be appreciated if residents in a position to contribute would kindly do so.

Tenants are requested to pass this information on to their landlords.

Bin wars

In what is being described as ‘bin wars’, the confusion over who legally owns the refuse and recycling bins originally given to local residents was addressed by the council recently. In this week’s Westmeath Examiner, they report that:

County Manager Danny McLoughlin said that 14,000 Blue Bins and 1,000 Brown Bins had been purchased by Westmeath County Council over the past six years and delivered to its customers for their use in the Council’s waste collection service, but having taken the decision to get out of the refuse service, they had legally sold them to Oxigen Environmental, as part of the public tendering process.

In addition to the bins, the database of customers was also sold to Oxigen. This explains why you might have seen their stickers plastered on the bins after leaving them out for emptying. However, the Westmeath Examiner also reports that someone from a refuse company entered private property during the night to place a sticker on a bin. This of course, is illegal so please do report any instances of trespassing to the Gardaí.

The situation seems to be somewhat clearer now. McLoughlin continues:

“…if people did not want to do business with Oxigen, they should phone the company and ask them to take the bins away: “People should give the bins back because they don’t own the bins, these bins were transferred to this company legally”

Read the full article

Both Allied Waste Management and Wallace Recycling will continue to empty the bins as normal. Unlike Oxigen, these are smaller local companies employing local people in a tough market so it makes sense to maintain your support for them. In particular, Allied Waste has been serving Westmeath for the past five years and are less expensive than Oxigen’s normal bin tag prices also.