Fine weather no excuse for nation's filthy behaviour

Good weather is a rare benefit in this country – why ruin it by dumping rubbish everywhere, asks ORNA MULCAHY.

W E’RE A filthy lot when the sun comes out. I don’t mean filthy in a naughty kind of way, and with the kind of mad sunburn that was around this week, I’d say that sort of filth has been given a rest by many. No, I mean just plain filthy dirty.

As soon as the weather heats up, we take our slovenly habits into the open, shedding rubbish along with our clothes, leaving trails of picnic mess for someone else to clean up. At the end of a summer’s day in the city the bins overflow so we dump bags of rubbish at their bases, making dirty shrines of them.

Our beaches are strewn with cans, bottles, cigarette ends, throwaway BBQ sets and abandoned socks – a disgusting tide of human flotsam that gets swept out to sea, to sicken the fish and the birds. Footpaths, green spaces, parks, woodlands and shore are clogged with stuff we use and toss aside, no matter who is looking.

The bank holiday weekend was glorious, but by the end of it, the litter was biblical. Portmarnock was a sea of cans and bottles, according to a resident who noticed punters bringing their black bags of rubbish to the beach to avoid bin charges. In Brittas Bay the car park was strewn with rubbish, and on the beach a five-year-old girl’s foot was burned when she stood on an a BBQ tray that someone had buried in the sand.

“It was like a bomb exploded in Cabinteely Park,” a street-sweeper from Dún Laoghaire- Rathdown said when I thanked him for removing shattered WKD bottles from outside our gate. He said he would have been out sooner, but the council’s “Swat” clean-up teams have had their overtime hours cut.

Overtime is the key word here. Why not change their hours, with a shift starting at 5am to clean public areas in high season? There’s no point sending cleaners to a beach during the day, when it’s so congested they can’t sweep the paths and decant the rubbish.

In Sandycove, the beach has been packed for a week, and the footpaths are fringed with crusty left-behind togs, crushed coffee cups, ice cream wrappers and bottles rolling in the gutters. Coke cans and crisp packets bob in the water. Of course litter is banned – there’s a big sign warning of on-the-spot fines of €150 and court fines of €3,000, but the guards, who had a full-time job dealing with the traffic, were turning a blind eye to the mess, and to the wholesale drinking that was going on at the Forty Foot.

Supermarkets have a lot to answer for with their special offers on trays of booze. Forget going to the pub on a sunny day. Now it’s a case of pack your togs and a six-pack of Druids Cider, and never mind the sun cream.

It’s not just feckless teenagers who litter. It’s parents too, with their endless baby and toddler paraphernalia. The new scourge is wet wipes. Once it was plastic bags that got everywhere – up in the trees, down in the sand, caught up in seagulls’ wings and strangling sea life – but now that the bags cost 22 cent, there are a lot less of them blowing about. Now, however, we have the wet wipe, a small square of saturated stuff that nobody knew they needed until Proctor Gamble started to show us how useful they were. Now parents cannot leave home without them. The days of spitting on a tissue, or a bit of sleeve, and wiping your child’s face with it (branding them with a smell that’ll make them shudder for life) are over. Instead we have detergent-laced wet wipes for faces and fingers and bottoms, and for scattering across the landscape afterwards.

Mná na hÉireann were offenders too, at the Flora women’s mini-marathon on Monday, leaving an ankle-deep trail of water bottles in their wake on some suburban roads. Okay, it was a six-mile run on a very hot day, but is it too hard to crush the bottle, put it in your backpack and take it home with the rest of your rubbish? This constant need to hydrate is reaching ridiculous proportions. Our forebears slogged across America and Australia in 40-degree heat to find a better life. We can’t even go for a jog without carrying a water bottle.

Egged on by drinks companies who tell us to wear water, sports coaches who warn of dehydration and spa therapists whose stock line is “your skin is very dry”, we’re seemingly afraid to stray too far from a water source, in case we keel over and turn to dust. But the more we drink, the more we have to think about getting rid of the plastic it comes in.

There was a brief moment there when Ireland led the way environmentally, with the smoking ban and plastic bag levy proving that change can happen almost overnight – so now Taoiseach, how about a Litter Tzar?

The Tidy Towns Competition, which cranks up about now, is good for getting shopkeepers to clean up their premises, sweep their bit of street and put out the hanging baskets. It’s a nice idea, but there’s another job entirely to be done in getting the lazy Irish to start cleaning up after themselves.