Yesterday evening.
Leonard’s Corner, South Circular Road. Road.
Harry Warren writes:
Outside of Tesco beside a take-a-way restaurant…Either the take-a-way consumers apart from being scruffy litter louts, are displaying their collective intelligence by mistaking the granite columns for dining tables or litter bins, or it is another example of Dublin City Councils ongoing failure to provide a functional litter collection service. Perhaps Broadsheet readers can advise?
P.S. the DCC litter bin outside of the take-a-way was full to overflowing…
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The littering thing is really doing my nut.
Where I live, there’s plenty of bins on the main streets and on the beach too. During the summer, the council always make sure to have plenty of extra bins out, but they’re not collected as often as they probably should be, especially the permanent ones on the street. As a result you have people leaving their rubbish beside overflowing bins or not disposing of their litter at all. It’s very frustrating.
Is it too much to ask that where a bin is overflowing, one brings one’s rubbish home for disposal? Just carry a small plastic bag for this purpose.
In my local park which has the DLR compactible bins which are frequently full of late, a trend has now emerged of folks nearly arranging all their takeaway coffee containers around the bins. I am amused by the sheer volume of such containers, in general how neat they are arranged around the bin and the dogged refusal to just take this waste to dispose at home.
Brilliant headline :)
It’s a calumny indeed !
Filthy Dublin City Council ensured there would be more litter on Dublin streets when they removed thousands of litter bins.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/2-000-bins-removed-from-dublin-streets-g6trx8kgg
“Almost 2,000 public bins have been removed from Dublin city since 2008, figures from the council’s litter management plans show”
It is the take away restaurant’s job to clean that up, not DCC’s.
Maybe not their responsibility – just needs a tiny bit of effort and pride – a €20 old school dustbin outside and job done.
“There’s no traffic on the extra mile”
While you not taking into account the cost of disposing of the resulting rubbish, you are correct. Takeaways and newsagents should be obliged to provide an outside bin (and making sure it is emptied, etc) as part of their planning.
This is from 2008
pubs and takeaways have been told to clean up outside their doors every hour in a bid to keep the city tidy.
Dublin businesses will be subjected to new litter laws after Dublin City Council passed proposals for a new by-law on the prevention and control of litter.
It means the people who run pubs and takeaways will be responsible for keeping the streets outside clean.
https://www.independent.ie/regionals/herald/news/pubs-to-do-litter-check-every-hour-27887907.html
has anything changed since then?
I suspect part of the problem is the whole rationale of DCC for removing public litter bins was their abuse by some filling it with bags of household waste.
Still, DCC could at least reinstate public bins on a temporary basis given the current situation with a caveat that if they are abused by being filled with household waste, they will be removed again.
An Irish problem to an an Irish solution. If trash were provided as a public good (paid for by taxes) you wouldn’t have scumbags dumping trash and jamming bins to save a few bob. The rationale that removing bins will prevent illegal dumping and stuffing is nonsense. Cheaters gonna cheat. They’ll just leave it on the street.
There has always been a problem with litter in Ireland – it predates pay-as-you-go bins.
There is a minority of scumbags that just don’t care.
I think property tax is a good idea but those who pay have to see some sort of benefit rather than it just being attendant upon simply owning property. Some property-related services, water, waste should form the rationale for the tax. Obviously for rural areas where such services are not supplied, a lower tax should be levied.
I agree with you that the privatisation of waste collection has led to a much greater incidence of illegal dumping but I don’t think there is any appetite whatsoever in DCC or other urban councils to get back to public household waste collection
rural areas pay a lower tax than urban areas – by virtue of their property being worth less.
The problem is the business providing the rubbish isn’t providing a bin.
No jumped up little jobsworth in Dublin City Council has the right, nor is it the correct thing to do, to penalise the majority of Dubliner’s who have civic pride and will use litter bins correctly due to the actions of litter louts.
DCC’s management have demonstrated especially recently that they are woefully incapable in looking after the most basic requirements of keeping a city clean.
Restore all of the cities litter bins now and add more for good measure :)
Is there a worse managed capital city in the EU?
If only the Dublin authorities had a year to prepare for the inevitable, particularly after the uproar about Dame Lane lat year.
Odd how the local shops all have a traffic light system for entry to ensure that areas do not get crowded, yet this approach does not get considered for manageable areas such as South William Street etc.
Alas many of the measures that the authorities have put in place for cyclists in my opinion are unsafe, sub standard and ugly. The planters since put in place at Newcomen Bridge end of the Royal Canal cycle-way are particularly splendid sitting on top of the dished pavement leading onto the road, after a mere €9M spent on less than a kilometre of cycle-way.
It is also an interesting fact that 20% of all residential property tax collected in Dublin is specifically allocated to be spent outside Dublin. This only happens with RPT collected in Dublin. It is theft from Dublin.
And then there’s the additional charge that city centre businesses pay for the Business Improvement Scheme, aka Dublin Town, which ensures that the city centre is a clean, safe, and pleasant environment. This is an extra levy on top of existing commercial rates, which in the old days used to cover refuse collection and other municipal services. What value for money are businesses getting for these charges?
Where is there any accountability of the decision making process and those paid to oversee the same?
Only today in Cork €185 million has been announced for their railways. Meanwhile Dublin is to get road widening and tree removal supposedly as part of BusConnects, of which Leo Varadkar has said that they ‘are looking’ at letting cars that are electric powered to use such bus lanes. So the result is shaping up not to be better public transport – but billions of state money to be spent on road-widening for cars to use.
So, back to my question, is there a worse managed capital in Europe – or even a worse run city in Ireland?
Letting EVs use the bus lane would make a complete joke of public transit. You need to a certain income to afford to an electric vehicle, which probably doesn’t represent a public transit user anyway. So all you’re doing is moving them from one lane to another at the expensive of all bus riders.
+1 The problem is the sheer accessibility of the city centre core by private motor vehicles. It doesn’t matter if they are fossil fueled or EVs, we need far fewer in central areas of a city with largely narrow and conjested streets.
Meanwhile in Cork…
“If I had my way I would have no bins around the county as I feel it only encourages people to leave litter”
Tim Lucey, CEO, Cork County Council
There’s literally no beginning to this fella’s talents. He makes Owen Keegan look like Copernicus in comparison.
https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-40275287.html
If you bought the stuff, it’s your duty to see it disposed of, stop blaming others as though you can’t carry a few bits of paper home with you.
you would think that takeaways could extend the ‘bring your own coffee cup’ idea to food. instead of giving you a bag of chips or whatever you can hand them in your own container for them to put their food in. they save on packaging, the taxpayer saves on the waste and you get to munch your chips in peace from the nagging iceholes.
of course, when i become minister for the environment this will become mandatory for virtually everything. instead of shelves on supermarkets there will be vats of cornflakes, coffee, teabags, milk etc and you fill up your container and pay by weight.