CCTV cameras due to be operational from last January to catch illegal dumpers in Dublin’s north inner city have not been installed due to a dispute between the council’s waste and public lighting departments.
Councillors were on Tuesday told the project has been delayed because the cameras cannot be attached to “public lighting poles” as had been planned by the waste management division.
Barry Woods, Dublin City Council’s head of waste management, said he had thought “probably naively” that the cameras could be mounted on the existing public lighting system.
“Unfortunately, we have been advised by public lighting management that CCTV cameras cannot be attached to any of their assets.”
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Some cabling powering street lights also powered traffic lights and the lighting section was concerned vandalism to the cameras could “knock out the traffic lights”, Mr Woods said.
The lighting section had also said its lamp standards were “heritage assets not suitable for mounting CCTV cameras,” he added. “This has delayed the installation of CCTV cameras.”
The waste management division was working with public lighting management and road works control to install new poles to accommodate CCTV cameras “that will only use solar power for the first phase of the scheme”, Mr Woods said.
“We anticipate poles and cameras being installed within the next four weeks.”
Several councillors said they were unhappy the delay and that they had not been informed the cameras were not operational.
Green Party councillor Janet Horner said she had spoken on radio last January “defending the council” and “insisting the council was going to fulfil its promise” to immediately install the cameras.
“I think it is really bad form seeing the timeline slip like this. We are the ones going out trying to communicate a public message on it,” she said.
Mr Woods on Tuesday rejected any suggestion “we are not committed as an executive to deliver a cleaner city”.
The council was “just about to roll out a major advertising campaign across the city to make people more aware of littering”, he said.
“We don’t create the litter, it’s the public that create the litter,” he said. “We are doing our bit.”
The council had last September announced plans to use CCTV to identify illegal dumpers for the first time in almost a decade. Three streets in the north inner city, the capital’s worst litter black spot, were chosen as pilot locations: Belvedere Place, Sherrard Street Lower and Summer Street North.
The north inner city is continuously identified as the dirtiest urban area in the State by Irish Business Against Litter.
The council installed CCTV a decade ago at litter black spots in the north inner city as part of a crackdown on illegal dumping. It subsequently erected a poster featuring 12 dumpers, with their faces blurred.
However, the move aroused the attention of the Data Protection Commission, which questioned the proportionality of the scheme and the rights to privacy of the dumpers.
The commission in 2018 undertook an investigation of CCTV use by local authorities nationally and concluded existing litter pollution and waste management law did not provide for using CCTV to identify dumpers.
New legislation, the Circular Economy and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2022, amended the Litter Pollution Acts to allow CCTV use, and the council has been working for the past two years with various State agencies to develop a new scheme.
Mr Woods in January said the data-protection impact assessments had been approved for the three chosen streets and it envisaged the cameras being operational by the end of that month.
