The annual strike of Dublin’s street-washing service – or rain, as it’s better known – is dragging on much longer than usual this year, with still no sign of resolution.
Most years, it’s settled almost before it begins. Often it lasts a week or two at most, then peters out. But 2026 is threatening to rival the long hot summer of 2018. And, as then, the city’s streets are filthy.
Especially near premises that serve food, drink, or nightlife, the state of footpaths has become an embarrassment. Yes, the street sweepers are working away, and apart from sporadic outrages, the seagulls’ ceasefire (Diary February 20th) is still holding.
There is consequently much less rubbish scattered around than before. In fact, many Dublin thoroughfares now border on tidy - at least after the sweepers have been through.
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The issue is the dried-in grime, accumulated from two months of leaks and spillages, and from the primordial ooze that gathers around the base of bins.
Over in London, the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry is the event of the summer. But the streets of Dublin, meanwhile, are a By-you Tapestry: making an exhibition of the things you and your friends did there last night or last week.
The mercy is that it’s all monochrome, at least after a day or two. Thanks to the lately ubiquitous sun, all the splashes, drips, and leaks quickly lose their colour like late-period Jackson Pollocks.
Then, you can’t tell the beer spillages from the body fluids, as the city’s misdemeanours resolve themselves into 50 shades of grey and charcoal.
Even so, many footpaths now resemble crime scenes. Everywhere you look, there are mysterious drag marks, as if left by murderers disposing of their victims.
No doubt they’re just traces of heavy, leaking refuse sacks being hauled towards the kerb. So I hope, anyway.
Here and there you also see conspicuously clean stretches of pavement, perhaps the result of local power-washing before the hosepipe ban came in.
On much maligned O’Connell Street this week, for example, I was pleasantly surprised at how pristine the area in front of the GPO was. Then again, I suppose stamps don’t leak. Nor, usually, does 1916 tourism.
I mentioned that the cessation of gull attacks in the city centre is holding well, which is true up to a point.
On the other hand, only a few weeks ago, I received an emergency text (via laptop) from my youngest offspring, reporting that a seagull had just made off with his phone.
This seemed an unlikely story, on a par with the title of a seminal 1970s punk album: Vampires Stole My Lunch Money. But, as since confirmed by witnesses, it was true.
Daniel was sitting with friends on the grass in Stephen’s Green at the time, very close to the lake, and had put his phone down briefly on a brown paper bag beside him.
A watching seagull concluded, not unreasonably, that the bag must contain food. In fact, it contained a pair of shorts, bought earlier.
But not knowing this, the bird swooped in to snatch it anyway, and so doing tipped the phone into the lake. The shorts were retrieved safely. The phone remains in its watery grave.
Okay, that was mere collateral damage. It confirmed, however, that the seagulls haven’t gone away (you know). A reserve army remains on alert for stray refuse bags defying the city centre ban, even if the great feeding frenzies of recent years have passed.
As for the desiccated detritus of Dublin’s street life, there’s not much we can do about that except wait (or maybe pray) for rain.
Alas, Dublin is not Paris, where an army of water-bearing trucks wash the streets every morning and a subterranean system laid down by Baron Haussmann in the 1860s flushes out the drains.
That continues even in a drought, since the water used is taken from the city’s canal system and would not in any case be potable.
But no more than London, Dublin does not have such Parisian luxuries as large-scale street washing. We could hardly justify them now with reservoirs running low.
It’s another mercy that, dirty as the city can still be, it’s not nearly as fragrant as it was in, say, Joyce’s Ulysses, where every street had its own smell and you kissed your girl (to paraphrase a later ballad) by an olfactory wall or nowhere.
It’s not even as bad as in the 1970 and early 80s when, as another song claimed, the river Liffey stank like hell (even though that was really the Camac, a truth revealed when the Clondalkin Paper Mills closed and both rivers stopped smelling overnight).
Still, the streets really are in a state. Reluctant as I am to invoke a return of rain, we could do with a nice downpour, at least: short but torrential. That would have the effect, currently, that a good Confession used to have on Catholics: washing all our sins away, if only for a day or two.
