A litter-free O'Connell Street where citizens and visitors can stroll without fear of walking on broken glass, or treading on chewing-gum, or having to step over the disgusting overspill from a litter bin seems too good to be true. Yet this is the vision presented by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Alderman Maurice Ahern, who today will launch an ambitious new initiative to prove that Dublin can remain dear without being dirty.
In the next three months, a pilot programme will focus on the north inner-city area bounded by O'Connell Street, Eden Quay, Portland Row, Summerhill and Parnell Street. The Corporation will then review the progress of the scheme with a view to extending it to other parts of the capital. The scheme will combine education - via billboard advertisements, street signs, leaflets, school visits and a children's competition - with enforcement, in the form of three extra litter wardens, a Garda liaison officer and a freephone number for the public to report littering, graffiti and abandoned vehicles. Other features include extra cleaning staff and machinery, 50 per cent more litter bins, and once-off collections of junk and hazardous waste from homes in the area. The Corporation "guarantees" to have the area litter-free each morning by 8 o'clock, with continuing cleaning throughout the day.
If the scheme manages to justify the dramatic headline on the Corporation's press release - "Lord Mayor to stamp out litter" - Mr Ahern will have earned the gratitude of the populace and ensured his niche in the city's history; for there is no doubt that ordinary people are fed up with the filth of the streets and exasperated by the failure to clean up. The frequency with which the country's chronic litter problem features in the Letters columns of this newspaper is sometimes referred to disparagingly by commentators, as if to suggest that letter-writers should have bigger things to worry about. Yet litter is a major problem. It is unhygienic; it degrades the environment; it is ugly and depressing; it is off-putting to visitors and bad for the country's image; it lowers the quality of life; it is a symptom of ignorance and social irresponsibility. It is well past time that it was tackled vigorously and imaginatively at government level. Yet sporadic hand-wringing by successive ministers for the environment, sometimes coupled with the launch of a soon-to-be-forgotten campaign, has done little or nothing to reduce the mess.
Back in 1997, the former Minister for the Environment, Brendan Howlin, was honest enough to admit that Ireland's litter problem persisted because there was no political will to solve it - "and it is quite clear that the Irish people of their own volition will not solve the problem without coercion and a modicum of education." Yet three years on, the lack of political will is still so striking that the pressure group Irish Business Against Litter recently attempted to shame the Government into more effective action through its prominent billboards reading: "Please ignore the litter; the Government does."
The Lord Mayor's new initiative is a welcome sign of determination from Dublin Corporation. It deserves the whole-hearted support of citizens - and it is to be hoped that it is a harbinger of effective action at national level.