Madam, – As a citizen of this lovely country, I am appalled by the dumped trash being allowed to accumulate on the roadsides. This year it is worse than ever. It seems that with cutbacks, county councils feel cleaning the roadsides of dumped trash is incidental to the quality of Irish life. It is as if the symbolic act of dumping and littering the roads, causing a disgusting accumulation of garbage, visually represents the despair of the country’s citizens.
Travelling around the Cotswolds in England recently, I noticed that there was not one piece of paper polluting the roads – they were immaculate.
Doesn’t Ireland, as a proud nation freed from the imposition of the British, wish to maintain at least as high a standard of cleanliness as those we worked so hard to get rid of? Or are we as primitive, crude and ill-mannered as they said we were? We need to love ourselves better. Because we can.
If we want to revive our economy with tourism, we might want to clean up the roads that lead the visitor around the countryside. Plastic bags of paper and household waste pasted along the roads do not inspire the viewer to enjoy the landscape. Piles of boxing, plastic containers, paper sweet wrappers cast aside, beer cans and other gross detritus, including corpses of dead cats and foxes, do not send a positive message.
Shouldn’t the Department of the Environment take responsibility and do the following? 1. Introduce a bold, aggressive television campaign to clean up litter. 2. Implement laws against littering. 3. Work with volunteer units of concerned citizenry, who could collect litter on more remote roads, which the council would then remove, asap. 4. Use non-violent prisoners to clean up rubbish in lieu of jail time. 5. Start a contest in schools to make children aware of their responsibilities to their country. 6. Erect permanent signs on every road stating fines for littering and, “Keep Éire Green! Keep Ireland Clean!” The latter might also inspire the bankers and politicians to begin to think of anti-litter slogans vis-a-vis correcting their own moral pollution. – Yours, etc,