The Workers’ Party’s representative in Meath, Séamus McDonagh, has condemned a decision taken by Meath County Council to privatise the provision of traffic warden services in the county.

McDonagh said:
“Is there any other workplace in the country where workers stand by and let themselves be done out of a job? That’s what our councillors and senior officials are doing. Every year, our Meath councillors happily vote in a budget which clearly does not have sufficient funding to provide the services that Meath needs. Every year, they then act surprised when services are cut or underperform. It’s time to wake up and get real – local government needs a shock to the system, not cosy deals, to get it working.”

He continued:
“This is just the latest in a long line of services which have been outsourced for the simple reason that county and city councils are not being properly funded – and they are not being properly funded because of a commercial ideology which wants them to be privatised. We have seen this happen in waste, in roads services, in housing maintenance – each time, the service is run down and underfunded, to give a rationale for privatising it.”

McDonagh concluded:
“The so-called ‘reassurances’ which Meath councillors received are cold comfort. If a private company is saying now it won’t need to operate on the basis of commission, you can be sure this will change as soon as they decide they aren’t making enough profit. And if there are too few people committing traffic and parking offences for this company to charge a fee – you can be sure they’ll be looking to government for compensation for that too.

“There has never been a service privatisation that wasn’t a bad deal.”