I had a pile of brick and stone that needed removed at the weekend. It was left over from some work in the garden last spring. There wasn't enough to justify a skip so I reckoned on 3 car loads up to the dump to shift it. There is access to the back garden via a 150m alley, but I though it easier to bag this all up in to rubble sacks and cart it through the house. My idea was to get all the sacks through the house, stack them at the front and do a couple of journeys up to the amenity yard, a mere 1/4 a mile away at Palmerstown Recycling Centre, a simple enough job you may think.
The amenity yard at Palmerstown Rd is one of those new swanky ones with collection points for all manner of bits and bobs, mobile phones, car batteries, wood, oil. They have a few men making sure that you don't put your batteries in the wood bin and the like. They are usually good craic and have a bit of banter when you are unloading, so i arrive and ask the guy where the brick rubble goes, he says you'll need to get out of the car for this one. So i park up and he tells me that they have removed the rubble skip for security reasons. I laughed and he said no seriously; "the builders were taking advantage and dumping their rubble illegally in the amenity yard, when we approached them they said that they would dump whatever the hell they liked or they would phone 'the boys' and have them shot".
It's hard to reply to that one, so I did the usual, only in Northern Ireland reply and tried to get some movement from him by acting helpless and explaining my situation, hoping he would allow me to dump it in the normal waste skip. There was no shifting him, and I could tell it was a fruitless exercise, so I asked if he knew of any other location that I could dump this rubble, he told me Holywood or Rathgael, both North Down Borough Council and not Belfast City.
He said when I arrived at one of these locations, not to mention where I had come from. This was due to a memo being sent to them telling them not to be sending people across council boundaries.
So off I head down the road to Holywood, on arrival there is no rubble skip, so an onward journey of about 10 miles takes me to Rathgael. I feel like a real bandit, crossing council bondaries to dispose of my rubble, I am embarassed to say there was more than a hint of elation when i noticed a rubble skip and got the car emptied.
So if you live in the Greater Belfast area, fill your tank with petrol before taking your rubble to the amenity yard, it will be a long journey, oh and you may need body armour.