DUBLIN CITY COUNCIL has said that it received 19 complaints from the public about litter on Friday.
Hundreds sat outside at popular areas such as the Grand Canal on Friday afternoon and Saturday, during two of the warmest days of the year so far.
Although none of these complaints referred to the Grand Canal or Barge area, there were a number of complaints from people on social media the next day, criticising those who left their rubbish behind.
Dublin City Council said that the area was usually cleaned by the day crew from Bow Lane Depot, but “due to the large crowd that were present on Friday night, the day crew were unable to access the area that required cleaning and the night crew assisted”.
Green Party councillor Claire Byrne brought an emergency motion to the council yesterday afternoon which called for a more stringent waste management plan in the good weather. An example of this could be more bins in ‘good weather hotspots’.
The council had put some extra bins out last weekend, which became full quickly. On Saturday morning the rubbish had been cleaned up by council workers, but Byrne said that soon after that there were a couple of hundred people out and she could “see it start it happening all over again”.
“We’ve a huge problem with litter in the city centre anyway – it’s just accelerated during the good weather, and the messages to the public just don’t seem to be sinking in,” she told TheJournal.ie.
It was brilliant to see everyone out in the streets over the weekend, because we just had a really long winter.
But it was disappointing to see the mess afterwards. We need to ask people to be more responsible, there’s this mindset that someone will come along and pick up after us. That really needs to change.
Her emergency motion also called for a more effective awareness campaign that would ask people to be more responsible and bring their rubbish home with them – particularly items that are recyclable.
A lot of the rubbish was recyclable and weight of those is really really low. It doesn’t take much to bring an extra bag and take it home with you.
Speaking in the Seanad on Monday, Fianna Fáil Senator Jennifer Murnane O’Connor said that she was “disgusted” at images of bottles, cans, food wrappers and other rubbish scattered along the canal at Portobello.
Why do people feel they can litter, dump, pollute. Why do we just lay down and accept this behaviour?
She added that “there has to be something real done here, there has to be consequences for this type of illegal dumping”.
On the Street Sweeping section of Dublin City Council’s website, it says that bins have been fitted with individual tags so that people can report a problem through an app.
It allows the general public to “instantaneously report problems with any litter bin in any area of the city with a few simple clicks of their phones”, the council says.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say