Walking out of my gate recently on to what used to be a quiet country road, I found myself sidestepping to avoid a large black object. It was a carpet from a car boot, seemingly dumped by a passing motorist. Two stomach-churning messes on it appeared to be dog vomit and dog faeces. Someone had found it easier to dispose of this unpleasant gallimaufry at my gate than to take it home.
I was presented with a problem. The carpet was too big to fit into my bin. Changing to a 140-litre bin had seemed a sensible when both my family and my income were decreasing. The new bin fits my own needs admirably, but
has little room for the ever-increasing garbage being dumped on my stretch of lovely roadside which, with increasing despair, I try to keep clean.
In winter nature lays bare the bones of the countryside; but in my part of Co Kildare, they are not left so by man. Around every country road, every quiet lane, the spew of humanity is evident. Litter is omnipresent.
From a car it can appear light enough - a mere dusting of chocolate wrappers and cigarette packages. But get out and walk and you will find that there is hardly a three-metre stretch without its complement of plastic bottles, crisp bags and tattered hub-caps. In field gateways, the debris thickens. Burst plastic bags vomit out their contents of polystyrene fast-food containers, drink cans, cartons and cups. Black plastic sacks erupt with every variety of household waste. Almost every ditch you look into sprouts a mattress, a carpet or the corpse of a washing machine.
Yet the county is supposed to be getting ready for perhaps the biggest ever influx of overseas visitors ever to converge on its erstwhile green fields. This September, almost a quarter-of-a-million people will visit the K Club in Straffan, just five miles from where I live. Television will transmit pictures of the area to over a billion people. The Ryder Cup will showcase to the world, not just Kildare, but the new, affluent Ireland, how we are now. But what will visitors find in the immediate environs of the K Club?
Kildare has never boasted the dramatic mountain or coastline scenery that makes some other counties famous. However, tall hawthorn and sloe hedges, lush pastures, fine stands of oak, beech and chestnut, pretty villages, picturesque bridges all combined to make an immensely pleasing landscape. But in the past 15 years, Ireland's new prosperity, combined with Kildare's proximity to Dublin, has led to a burst of development. One gets used to every village being enveloped by suburban housing estates. One accepts the ubiquitous bungalows strewn all along the main roads. One even accepts how, on so many of the quieter roads, hedge and field have been replaced by stud-rail fencing and manicured lawns, often around giant, electronically gated mansions. What is not acceptable, however, is the litter trail. Common to all, it snakes gallantly between country cottage, bungalow and gated hacienda.
A knee-jerk reaction is to blame Kildare County Council, which appointed four litter wardens in 1999. Three of these have left the service at different times since then and so far none of these has been replaced. According to the council, however, a new warden is due to be appointed shortly. So, we will have just two people responsible for the tidiness of approximately 654 square miles of country roads in a county where the population has soared 136,000 in the 1996 census to an estimated 180,000 in 2006.
On questioning a county council on the wisdom of such frugality, I was roundly informed that Kildare was seriously under-resourced and that the council received less funding from the Government on a per capita basis than many other counties. However, the spokesperson claimed that, in spite of this, approximately €12.6 million will be spent on the various branches of waste management in Kildare in 2006.
To be fair to the council, I have frequently used its recycling centre at Silliott Hill and I know it is a model of its kind. Moreover, tidiness in towns throughout the county has improved in recent years, thanks to the expenditure of over €1 million a year on street sweeping, plus support for the Tidy Towns and Pride of Place competitions.
But none of this has reduced the volume of rubbish on country roads. Bin tagging may have raised awareness of finite disposal resources among conscientious residents of the county, but it prompts the less scrupulous to use the countryside as their tip. The council admits to a small rise in the amount of dumping since tagging was introduced, but the most superficial examination of just a few miles of Kildare countryside shows this claim to be disingenuous.
Litter is less evident when the grass is high, and it looks as if Kildare County Council is depending on nature to cover our litter problem before the Ryder Cup takes place.To date, it has no plans for specific initiatives either to raise awareness or to tidy up the countryside before the event. Yet this is a problem of image, which does not solely concern Co Kildare, but the country as a whole. Surely there is a role here for the Government. While it is sad that it should take an event such as the Ryder Cup to propel us to action, the opportunity should not be neglected. An intense, imaginative, anti-litter campaign in the county could provide a lead for other counties to follow.
Personally, I want to see chain-gangs of ankle-shackled litterers being led out at five every morning to work an 18-hour day, to make Kildare beautiful once again. In the meantime, does anyone need a carpet for their car boot?
