Some residents of Dublin’s north inner city have “no sense of pride for their community” and “dump their waste daily” in the street, according to a report from Dublin City Council’s head of waste management.
Large numbers of “multi-let” properties in the northeast inner city generated a “huge amount of waste” and a change in legislation to make landlords responsible for their tenants’ waste collection should be considered, Barry Woods said.
He was responding to reports from the Irish Business Against Litter (Ibal) group, which repeatedly rank the north inner city as the dirtiest urban area in the State.
The anti-litter lobby group is working with An Taisce to survey cleanliness levels in 40 urban areas around the State. Its final survey for last year put the north inner city at the bottom of the league table, with Dublin city centre just one position above it.
The council had let Ibal know that “we are not that happy with the league table that’s produced”, Mr Woods told councillors on Tuesday.
He said Dublin had 8.5 million visitors last year “yet we are compared to the likes of Ennis or Tralee”.
“We feel we should be compared to Glasgow or Manchester, a city of comparable size that would have similar visitor numbers to us,” he added.
Mr Woods said vacant and derelict sites in central areas of the city presented additional litter problems.
“We have explained to [Ibal] that it takes considerable amount of time to do title searches to determine who owns those properties, and we need to do that to follow up with prosecutions, so that takes time as well.”
As an example, Ibal had criticised the presentation of a derelict Georgian house at 30 North Frederick Street, which was “used as a dumping ground”.
This site was a “a difficult one to resolve,” according to Mr Woods’s report.
“The last title search showed the property is owned by two elderly people, one of which resides in a nursing home. They have no way of getting it cleaned and would require assistance.”
However, the chair of the council’s central area committee, Cllr Janet Horner, pointed out the building in question was bought last year by the council.
“This is a site of consistent littering,” the Green Party member said. “Priority number one should be to clean up the site, the fact that departments don’t talk to each other in Dublin City Council is of concern when we are seeing reports like this.”
Ibal spokesman Conor Horgan said it would consider changing the way it presents the litter league if the area was “clean or even moderately littered”.
“As it stands, the key point for me is that our capital city is ‘littered’ and Dublin north inner city is ‘seriously littered’. Irrespective of how we present the findings, this will be the story,” he said.
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