A RECENT European Union survey of Irish attitudes to the environment found that domestic litter was the greatest cause of individual complaint. Marginally more people were concerned about litter levels in their local area than were worried about crime and vandalism. On this issue, Ireland finds itself out of line with public opinion in most other European countries where litter is a matter of less public concern because it represents less of a problem. Ireland, however, has recorded some improvement in recent years in removing litter from the landscape. Hardly any city or town was deemed “litter free” by international standards in 2002. Today, two-thirds of the 60 towns and cities surveyed annually have attained that status, according to the latest report by An Taisce on behalf of Irish Business Against Litter (Ibal).
Nevertheless, Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford are still ranked as “littered” while Galway is rated as “moderately littered”. But even this modest overall improvement is now in jeopardy. The reason is a decision by local councils to cut their weekend cleaning budgets. The result is more litter left uncollected in streets, in parks and on beaches at weekends when such facilities are in greatest public use.
Quite rightly, Ibal has described the cutbacks as a false economy. Where local hotels and shops have invested in tourism, their efforts will be quickly undone if discarded rubbish is allowed to accumulate at weekends. A holiday resort can quickly become a public eyesore and one that tourists will avoid. The state of many of our most popular beaches after the recent bank holiday weekend – when cans, bottles and bags of rubbish lay discarded – has illustrated the scale of the national litter problem.
The failure of local councils to collect weekend rubbish is accentuated by those who discard their debris and then leave it for others to collect. The litter louts, who largely go unpunished, are the culprits. Yet, it seems little effort is made to use litter wardens to enforce anti-litter legislation when and where the law is most flagrantly breached: at weekends, on beaches and in parks. There is no simple solution to the national litter problem. It is not just a matter of local councils resuming weekend collections – which they should do. The litter problem also demands a far stricter enforcement of the law. And, quite clearly, there is a need to persuade and educate a minority of the public to a sense of civic responsibility and to a feeling of national pride in a clean environment.