Litter wardens from Dublin Corporation are going on the beat today in search of leftover election posters from the recent European and local authority polls. Any posters they find will be subject to on-the-spot fines of £25 each, which will be charged to the political parties in question.
The corporation is taking the action under the 1997 Litter Pollution Act which requires the parties to remove their posters a week after polling day.
"If we were to implement the law in full, last Saturday we could have got thousands of pounds," said Dublin Corporation's Anti-Litter Officer, Mr Kevin O'Sullivan.
The political parties generally try to comply with the spirit of the law, he said.
However, the main parties have expressed confidence that the only remaining posters are "strays", missed by party workers involved in clean-up campaigns.
A Labour Party spokesman said he "certainly would hope that everybody would have all their posters down at this stage".
"We insist on our people taking down the plastic ties too, because they're an eyesore," he said.
According to the corporation, Labour "topped the pole" in the 1997-98 period, when its posters cost the party £1,200 in litter fines. This - and the fines paid by the other parties - amounts to only a fraction of the £80,000 in fines and court awards received by the corporation in the period. However, Mr O'Sullivan pointed out that election litter only appears for very short periods, contrasting with general litter, which appears all the time.
Spokesmen for Fianna Fail and for Fine Gael were also confident that most of their posters had already been removed by election workers.
"We paid for several teams to remove posters last weekend and earlier this week," said a Fine Gael spokesman. "It's inevitable that the odd stray will get away, but we're confident that 99.5 per cent of them are down."
