Litter wardens are afraid to work on weekend nights; litter louts are rarely fined; tourists regularly complain about our filthy towns; and businesses which refuse to pay bin charges are creating a serious rat problem. But do we care? And can we change? Kathy Sheridan went on litter patrol in our dirty aul' town.
Three a.m. on a Monday morning and we're tiptoeing down a dark lane - tiptoeing, because to Dublin City Council's litter men, this is Rat Alley.
It runs behind a cluster of "cool" food joints in a smart city street, joints so cool they haven't paid their bin charges, so their waste is not being collected. Black bags, beer cans, catering carton lids lie around. The stench of urine is nauseating.
Rory O'Hanlon, a Council inspector and 22-year veteran of the waste battle, has never got used to the rats: "You might see 50 to 100 of them here at times. I don't know how people eat in those restaurants. I wouldn't".
And that's before we get to Temple Bar, the "dirtiest and busiest part of the city" in the words of litter warden, Sean Michael Larkin.
Litter wardens work nights; not many people know that. When lap-dancers are climbing back into their mini-buses, the nation's future is staggering from the clubs and take-aways and drunks are throwing punches or doing press-ups in the middle of Westmoreland Street, Larkin is on his rounds in a white van that advertises his occupation in blue, six-inch-high letters.
In Temple Bar, the wind is whipping up the detritus of sandwich bars and take-aways, lap-dance club flyers, burst black bags, bottles and cans. He pulls on gloves that are bullet - though not syringe - proof (nothing is), and sifts through bag spillage until he finds a computer print-out that identifies the owner, a travel company. Now he has evidence.
The work can be dangerous; litter wardens are unwilling to work on Friday and Saturday nights. Earlier this Sunday evening, a warden was assaulted by two youths and a girl, yelling that he was a "Garda rat".
Larkin, a man of small, slim build, is clear on his priorities: safety first, job second. When he asks a spaced-looking young fellow to go back, pick up his beer bottle and put it in a bin, there's a moment of suspense. But the bottle goes in the bin.
The Whitefriars Street church entrance is festooned with Guinness cans, tabloid papers and a shirt; urine trickles down the pavement.
As Larkin works, sifting, observing, taking notes, the streets are buzzing with four kinds of Council sweepers, from lorry-sized down to the small hand-pushed vacuum machines, one being operated by a lonely worker in an eerie laneway off Earl Street. The washer crews are out by now, hosing down the urine and pools of vomit.
Larkin's is not a cool Celtic Tiger kind of job. He is used to being seen as a figure of fun but can't see the humour in it. As we speak, a car-load of young lads are grinning and pointing like monkeys. As the night wears on, the challenge of cleaning up after a filthy populace looks hopeless. It is 24-hour drudgery - dirty, repetitive, frustrating and enormously costly. Given a magic wand, Larkin would ban all fast-food outlets from O'Connell Street. He's entitled to his fantasies. Con Coll, the executive manager of the Council's engineering department has a similar fantasy about chewing gum; in one back-breaking manual exercise, they dug 35,000 pieces of it out of Grafton Street's lovely new paving. (The expensive gumbuster machines only undermine the bricks.)
We are a dirty people, they say. Who can deny it? Well, a lot of people actually. The most common responses the Council gets when people are challenged about litter are: "Why should we be cleaning up? That's your job" and "Ah, we're not all that dirty".
So how dirty are we? The good news is that litter pollution can be measured numerically. The bad news is that when last measured, in 1997, Ireland scored just 58 (where full marks were 100); which means heavily littered. Sweden, Finland and Norway fared much better with scores in the 80s - virtually litter free.
Five years on, how are we doing? Well, a National Litter Monitoring System has been in the pipeline long enough to produce two annual reports.
So, we ask the Department of the Environment, what does the report tell us about our national litter rating and how individual local authorities are performing. "We don't publish that ourselves. You can read the report on the TES website", they say. TES? "That's the engineering company charged with developing and overseeing local authority implementation of the system".
But shouldn't something so relevant and costly to the taxpayer be on the Department's own website? No, TES is responsible for it, they insist (the TES contract which ran out in May has been extended to the end of this year).
Odd, very odd, but for lack of time to argue, we turn as directed to www.litter.ie, the TES website. To cut 28 pages short, we learn that after a stunningly apathetic start, just 10 out of some 90 local authorities had returned their benchmark litter surveys by December 2001.
No detail emerges of how these 10 rated individually, only the unremarked upon conclusion that fewer than 1 per cent of locations were grossly polluted; 15 per cent had moderate to significant pollution levels; while more than 80 per cent were found to be unpolluted or only slightly polluted. The site was last updated five months ago.
However, the county councils of Cavan, Offaly, Sligo and Westmeath, as well as Limerick and Waterford Corporations and Longford Town Council, did turn up the startling information that 67 per cent of all their litter is cigarette-related - 52 per cent of that being butt ends which are slower to biodegrade than you think - and nearly 8 per cent is chewing gum.
But after all that phoning and reading, we're still none the wiser about where we stand in the international litter league table.
A few things however are clear: the State is attempting to measure itself with information supplied by its own local authorities (when independent surveyors would be more credible) and it is not going to publicise detailed results if it can help it.
Excellent news for the recalcitrant local authorities who can drag their heels a while longer.
So should we look to another State monitoring body, Bord Fáilte and its Visitors Attitudes Survey, for enlightenment? This survey suggests that on average, one in eight visitors takes a dim view of our litter problem. Not good. But as we come to depend increasingly on our European neighbours for tourism, let's focus on our German visitors. In 2000, a whopping 34 per cent were "dissatisfied" with the litter situation; in 2001, only 24 per cent were. Very encouraging. But hang on: in 1999 the figure was 25 per cent.
How can that be? How valuable are such subjective surveys? The only consistent pointer in this one, is that year after year, litter slots into a dreary second place (behind value for money) in the German dissatisfaction stakes.
So what measuring sticks are we left with? Anecdotes; the hardy annual missives from "Disappointed of Dusseldorf" and "Disgusted, Des Moines"; the inevitable creeping flush of embarrassment when escorting a foreign visitor, around, say, the dunes of Achill, Temple Bar at 2 a.m., or on a train out of Heuston.
Apart from the Tidy Towns (which visits candidates once a year and can make a fearful hames of it- last year's report managed to confuse the hamlet where I live with somewhere entirely different), the only other pointer we have comes from Irish Business Against Litter, spearheaded by Tom Cavanagh. It is costing IBAL well over €100,000 to fund and promote its year-long, seven-days-a-week, litter league survey of 29 towns.
For that we get a scheme "predicated on the belief that exposing the performance of local authorities in this very public way will compel them into action", in the words of Cavanagh - or as Matt Twomey, assistant Dublin city manager, describes it: "the publication of arbitrary and unrepresentative 'league tables' which can unfairly tarnish whole communities on the basis of selective and limited survey work".
Cavanagh will not be thwarted. "Coaxing doesn't work. Talk to schools and it has a 24-hour effect." He reckons that exposure by way of public measuring, and enforcement, are the twin keys to the problem. "Look at Tuam. It came bottom in the first IBAL survey and the traders there were very upset. But having bellyached for a few weeks, it took action and started to clean itself up. In Ballina and Tralee, where they got bad results, they immediately had a public meeting. What that does is isolate the baddie, the one who's letting everyone down."
But enforcement is another day's work.
If enforcement means pinning down the baddie and making him or her squeal, then we have a problem. Of 28,000 on-the-spot fines issued by local authorities last year, fewer than half were paid; and only a third of prosecutions taken resulted in convictions.
And if the number of fines issued sounds impressive, think again; divided between some 90 local authorities, they work out at around six a week per authority, while IBAL reckons that some 40,000 offences are committed in each authority area every week. Ten town councils issued no fines or prosecutions at all from July to December last year.
If the system depends on trained, committed, full-time litter wardens, these results are hardly surprising. Some authorities pay lip service by appointing "part-time" litter wardens. In south Tipperary, in one six-month period, 26 part-timers managed to issue just 29 on-the-spot fines, according to Cavanagh.
Others who appoint full-time wardens (about half of all local authorities) often show a risible appreciation of the job's significance. One authority, required to redeploy a lorry-driver's assistant, found a quick fix by making him a traffic warden.
Ignorance and indifference are writ large in a story Cavanagh tells about walking up the Dublin south quays past a court-house, outside which the pavement was littered with hundreds of cigarette butts. He went in and asked one of about 20 gardaí inside did they realise that as occupiers, they were in breach of the Litter Act. "He claimed he never heard of it and said: 'Do you mean we have to go out and sweep the streets? - Sure that's the job of the Corporation. If that's the law, it's a stupid law and I'm not enforcing it'."
So Cavanagh then dropped into the City Council's offices nearby, told the story to a member of staff and asked if she intended to send down a litter warden. "She said: 'Oh I wouldn't like to do that', but if I would like to go back and establish the contact, she might facilitate them by putting a bin outside."
IBAL is not forking out €100,000 simply to be good citizens. It recognises that there are serious commercial interests at stake. "It's about how we want to live with each other and the kind of place we want to live in, but it also spills over into areas such as tourism and the food industry and potential investors," says Cavanagh.
"Whereas previously, Ireland was able to attract inward investment by offering tax breaks and cheap labour, we are now a high-cost country and will have to operate to different standards if we want to make it an attractive place for the spouses of people who might be considering setting up businesses here. We're going to have to be different, more like the rest of the world."
More like the rest of the world. Can we do that and still be the laidback, irreverent practitioners of the craic, celebrated in song and story? Michael John O'Mahony, a young geology graduate working with An Taisce, wonders if there is some kind of unwitting balancing act in our psyches, whereby that predilection for the craic and a laidback lifestyle militates against rules and orderliness.
A friend of his who attended a recent four-day rock festival in northern Germany arrived at the campsite with 45,000 others, upon which every person was handed a bag in which to put their cans for recycling. The hefty deposit system for plastic or glass bottles bought on site ensured that they were returned to the place of purchase. At the end, all that remained on the site were rows of neatly tied bags, and not a scrap of litter; they took it home with them.
People here laugh out loud at that story.
Now compare that with the experience of a colleague who took the number 15 bus into the city from south county Dublin on Wednesday morning. She found the upper deck blocked by two seats across the stairs and a handwritten notice saying: "Sick upstairs".
Would we see that anywhere else in the civilised world? Are we culturally incapable of change? Maybe. We triumphed over the plastic bags (suddenly terminally uncool); our habit of parking cars wherever, has been buried by the clampers; drunk-drivers, though still around, are seen as anti-social morons.
But the common thread is obvious: it took punitive measures to effect each change to begin with. Patricia Oliver, An Taisce's environmental unit director, reckons it's more complex than that. It's cultural, she says. It's about seeing a correlation between good service and cost, it's about enforcement and reward, but above all, it's about the recognition that there is no "quick-fix".
"Cleaning oneself and one's home is a non-stop task - keeping the country clean is just the same," says Oliver.
Today, Dublin City Council publishes its name-and-shame list of litter louts in the belief that people are still capable of shame (see page five in the main paper today). In addition to the €20 million a year it spends on street cleaning, it is spending another €5 million on a three-year, city-wide clean-up with promises of thousands of extra bins, warden allocations, and the kind of junk collections and "bring centres" that neighbouring counties - whose inhabitants have been stumping up bin charges for years - can only dream about. All this in a city whose citizens are still electing TDs solely on the promise of fighting bin charges.
This weekend, Sean Michael Larkin will be back on the streets, still fascinated at the speed with which people can foul their own surroundings, but plugging away, trying to change a national mindset. And still a figure of fun . . .