IT IS a question this citizen of Dublin asks again and again after living for several months in the French capital: Why are the streets, pavements and parks of Paris, whose 4.5 million people produce 1.8 million tonnes of rubbish every year, so clean? The Irish capital, which produces a mere 195,000 tonnes of rubbish annually, is incomparably dirtier.
The splendour of Paris's public buildings is world famous, and the main reason why over 20 million tourists visit the French capital every year. So it is no surprise that they are spotless. The metro and bus network is a model of how urban public transport should be funded and run, and is similarly clean.
But the public cleanliness does not stop there. Last week, I wandered around two of the more working class areas of town: north of the Gare du Nord and south of the Gare d'Austerlitz. There was a striking absence of litter. Every 100 metres was a bright green small waste bin attached to a lamp post; every 400 to 500 metres was a bigger container for glass. At a number of intersections were parked the distinctive green rubbish and street washing lorries of the city council's cleansing department.
The main reason why Paris is so clean is that the city council has the kind of cleansing budget Dublin Corporation can only dream about over £200 million per year. Its cleansing department employs 6,000 people, 4,500 of them as streetsweepers who double as refuse collectors and are easy to spot in the Paris streets in their smart green uniforms.
Paris has been taking its cleanliness seriously for at least the last 112 years. That was when the law was passed which still governs much of its cleansing operations and daily rubbish collections were instituted by Monsieur Poubelle, the city's prefect, who thus gave his name to the modern French word for dustbin.
The city is now kept clean using both 19th century low tech and 21st century high tech methods. Streetsweepers with their old fashioned brooms of tough plastic twigs are still the front lined troops, says Thierry Arnaud, the cleansing department's deputy chief engineer, and they sweep every street in Paris's 20 districts at least once a week.
Paris is very unusual among European cities in that household and office refuse is collected every day, either morning or evening (up to 11.30 p.m.), depending on the nature of the district; residential areas tend to be served at night.
A municipal by law lays down that the closed rubbish containers provided by the city to every house, apartment block and public building have to be put out on the footpath an hour before the arrival of the collection lorry and be taken in again a quarter hour after they have been emptied. Ninety per cent of Paris's rubbish is incinerated.
There are 20,000 waste paper bins around the city, compared to 3,500 in Dublin. They are cleared at least once a day - and in tourist areas like the Champs Elysees and Les Halles up to four times a day.
Then there is the extraordinary and - in my experience of European cities - unique sight of the gutters being washed once, twice and occasionally even three and four times a day from sluices under the pavements, which are filled by recycled water from the Seine and the city's canals.
As if that was not enough, there is an extraordinary range of high tech green vehicles, ranging from tiny vans fitted with movable jets to hose the gutters under and between parked cars, to huge bulldozer like lorries which sweep and hose down the wide pavements of the great boulevards. If a pavement has too many pedestrians or other obstacles, a man with a high pressure hose or portable vacuum cleaner on his back cleans it by hand.
None of this prevents those world champion complainers, the Parisians, from moaning about the state of their city's streets. Their main grievance is what the city's 200,000 dogs do to the pavements. A decade ago the city contracted a firm to provide 50 small motorcycles equipped with vacuum pipes to trawl the pavements sucking up the dogshit.
In the seventh district where I live, which has a high proportion of elderly people living in apartments with dogs, these mobile "pooper scoopers" wending their way in and out of the pedestrians are an accepted part of the landscape. But they are only - literally - scraping the surface of the problem, as are the little white dog signs you see painted on the pavement to remind dog owners that their beloved mutts should do their business in the gutter, where it can be washed away.
The city's officials stress that while they may run a highly sophisticated cleansing department, this does not mean that the city's inhabitants are any cleaner in their habits than those of other European cities. Children are not taught to respect the environment any more in French schools than in Irish schools, although the still important tradition of eating proper meals twice a day, and few if any snacks in between, means that they have less opportunity to drop sweet and crisp wrappers in public places.
Paris's experience shows what political will and lots of money can achieve, sometimes against the inclinations of many city inhabitants. It also shows that if Dublin really wants to become a showcase European city, it will require a lot more than occasional underfunded anti litter campaigns by the Department of the Environment.