Dublin council rejects litter claim

Dublin City Council has reacted sharply to the Irish Business Against Litter (Ibal) survey which found the city to be "a complete disgrace" and the State's worst "litter black spot".

The city council has accused Ibal of inappropriate conclusions, claiming its survey was not based on continuous monitoring and that issues had arisen about the timing of its assessments.

The council particularly took issue with the finding that Finglas and Dublin's Iveagh and Moore Street markets were very unsightly and generally in a dreadful condition.

According to assistant city manager Matt Twomey, the disparity between the Ibal survey and others, such as the National Survey carried out by the Department of the Environment, is that "Ibal visited the Finglas area only on a Saturday afternoon."

"The National Survey did it over a week and found high levels of cleanliness. The city council carries out cleaning at weekends from 6pm to 10pm, the Ibal survey is a snapshot taken before cleaning began."

Mr Twomey said the city would spend €20 million this year on cleaning - an increase of €5 million in recent years.

But while he insisted the city was not adverse to criticism, he maintained that "streets like Grafton Street and Henry Street have a 'footfall' [ the number of daily pedestrian movements in the street] of 30 million, so it is not possible to clean them at high trading times."

Mr Twomey also insisted that assessing the cleanliness of Dublin's Camden Street, Moore Street and Iveagh markets when the markets were in session was unfair.

Major clean-up operations swung into operation every time the market closed, he said.

Taking issue with Ibal, Mr Twomey said last year the survey had found Ennis, Co Clare, to be one of the dirtiest towns in Ireland before another survey had awarded it a national prize in the Tidy Towns competition.

He accused Ibal of "taking a snapshot" whereas "more reliable surveys" were based on continuous assessment.

The city council insisted that the timing of the surveys had to be a big issue in the judging as to judge cleanliness when a market was in session was manifestly unfair.

The Ibal survey followed a recent study by Fáilte Ireland which found that after high prices, litter was the main source of dissatisfaction among visitors to Ireland.