A campaign group, Irish Business Against Litter, has started a multilingual billboard campaign aimed at embarrassing the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, over what it claims is his failure to ensure litter laws are enforced "on a vigorous and uniform basis".
The campaign, based in Dublin, is to operate along the lines of a similar one in Cork in which posters displayed the legend "Welcome to Cork, sorry about the litter".
In Dublin the legend will read "Welcome to Dublin, excuse the litter", and posters will be printed in French, Italian and English. The posters will be visible at a number of locations in Dublin city and county.
Dr Tom Cavanagh, chairman of the campaign, said there has been enough talk about how terrible the litter problem was.
"When in opposition the present Minister, Mr Dempsey, rightly stated that legislation was useless unless it was effectively implemented. Yet after more than 2 1/2 years in office, this has not happened."
Dr Cavanagh also said that "simply appealing to people to stop littering as the Minister does is not enough" and he compared the problem to illegal car-parking in Dublin, which he said had been combated by vigorous enforcement.
Bord Failte and the Irish Hotels Federation have recently expressed concern about the litter problem and its effect on the tourism market.
The campaign is to run for four weeks.
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