Well, there's a city councillor in Dublin who came round to our door the other week, grabbed a few bags of rubbish and flung them into the bin lorry as it cruised through the estate. It was nothing personal: she did it for loads of other people too.

Joan Collins, an Independent in every sense of the word, isn't moonlighting as a binwoman.

Her assistance to nonpayers of the 'waste charge' (what she and her fellow campaigners still call the bin tax) is part of a calculated campaign to buck up the resistance on this almost-forgotten issue. Tossing bags of rubbish into the back of the truck is a perfectly legal alternative to paying for collection.

In the last few weeks the city council's binmen have stopped handling 'untaxed' bins in parts of Collins's ward of Crumlin-Kimmage, and thanks to a spirited local campaign there are roads in the area that fill up every week with self-service bag-tossers.

I'm sure some of you are thinking, 'He's a tosser all right.' Or 'sponger' perhaps.

Surely we journalists get paid enough for collecting the detritus of our addled minds and tossing them into the odd column? Did I really need Collins flinging bags of smelly nappies into a lorry, or could I have paid for the proper service?

It's a matter of principle. Last week the Circuit Court cleared the way for a Supreme Court hearing of the campaign's case against Dublin City Council's charges, at least as they were set in 2001/02.

If there's room for an argument in the highest court in the land, then perhaps it's time that the nation's columns and airwaves were reopened on this issue.

One reason the matter remains quiet is that Dublin City Council has started non-collection piecemeal.

Each week non-payers in different parts of the city speculate whether they will be next to retrieve their wheelie bins and find them still full, sporting the dreaded orange tag, with its politely phrased invitation to phone the council and get regularised.

Parts of Crumlin continue to have full collections. So do other areas of heavy resistance, such as Ballyfermot, Drimnagh, Walkinstown, Coolock and Donaghmede. A similar approach, called a 'honeycomb strategy' by campaigners, has been used by other Co Dublin local authorities.

Whatever the reasons for the uneven enforcement of the 'tax', the effect is that the campaign against it doesn't get a threshold moment of critical mass.

At a feisty campaign meeting in Crumlin a few weeks back organisers were disappointed at the attendance of 120 people . . . a crowd that activists on most issues would regard as a resounding success.

(Interestingly, the sign-up sheet had no space for people's email addresses, a mark of the media habits and class composition of the crowd. ) When arguments about domestic waste charges flared a few years ago, some proponents were keen to promote them as a way of strengthening local government in Ireland, giving authorities this self-sustaining revenue stream. Leaving aside the fact that local taxation regimes, like the ones I knew in the United States, often end up exacerbating socio-economic differences between communities, it's perfectly obvious now that most authorities, once they've got the system working and payers compliant, will privatise the service.

The effects of privatisation could be seen, and smelled, in Limerick some weeks ago, when up to 3,000 homes and businesses got no refuse collection because a private collector went into liquidation.

Some campaigners there called for Limerick City Council to resume its own collection service, to give householders a choice rather than leave them at the mercy of an effective monopoly.

The demand presumably was tinged with irony. Waste collection, like many services, makes perfect sense as a monopoly, as long as that monopoly is run in the public interest. Do you really think everyone on your road should be free to choose among different rubbish-collectors, depending on particular needs, price-plans or whatever? Each household might get the best possible deal, but the road could have a different bin lorry, or two, on it every day.

And given that the new era in waste management is supposed to be good for the environment, that doesn't seem like the most efficient means of minimising, say, noise, traffic hazards and diesel pollution.

Ah, but the charges have got us all recycling, haven't they? Indeed, last Sunday I battled through the snarled-up cars at 'Ballyogan Recycling Park' on Dublin's southside.

This 'park' seems to be a favourite destination for a sunny afternoon, as thousands of well-intentioned people spend their own resources . . . time, petrol, sweat and muscle . . . to deliver materials that can then be profitably hauled away. The justice or environmental efficiency of this arrangement escapes me.

The 'polluter pays' principle makes some sense as a means of regulating corporate behaviour, but little when it comes to domestic rubbish . . . at home, 'pollution' is built into the means by which the marketplace allows us to consume. By and large we don't produce rubbish; we just pass it on from the companies that sell it to us. And since poorer people are often least equipped to exercise consumer choice about, say, the amount of packaging they buy, the principle can end up worsening inequities. (There's also inequity between terrace-dwellers who can buy tags for rubbish-bags, and others who must pay arrears on their wheelie-bins, but that's another day's work. ) Poorer people can of course get waivers, for now. And now that Dublin City Council is not emptying some untaxed bins, more people will apply for the waivers, revealing how much household poverty remains in the Celtic Tiger's lair. Meanwhile, illegal dumping is increasingly visible.

Is an efficient, centrally funded public service to collect domestic rubbish and the widest possible range of recyclable material really beyond this society's ability to deliver?

There's a campaign out there that says otherwise, and its power will be tested in the months to come.