Sir, - We could paper a large room with letters on this topic. We could paper the National Concert Hall with glossy leaflets and brochures from the Department of the Environment. What we cannot do is point to the slightest improvement on the ground. It is surely time to acknowledge that all our efforts through Tidy Towns and the National Spring Clean are like putting flesh-coloured sticking plaster over a serious skin lesion.
Indeed, we who get involved in such campaigns may actually be making the problem worse. All our efforts to tackle litter after it has occurred enable the Department and the Minister to sit back, basking in unmerited glory, and do nothing to prevent the litterers from dropping the stuff in the first place. While the crew is so willing to bale out the ship, why should the owners do anything to fix the leaks?
The answers are already enshrined in law. They have been explained many times in these columns. But no one in power has written in to explain why they are barely enforced - much less why the grand promises in the Government's last election manifesto have been dropped.
The system needs a jolt to get it on a new track. I believe that if a majority of Tidy Towns committees privately told the Department that they would consider a symbolic withdrawal from the symbolically significant first competition of the new millennium, unless the Government started enforcing the law and enacting the promises in its own manifesto, it would provide that jolt. Then we could start the new millennium in an entirely different frame of mind and with some real hope at long last.
I offer this idea for discussion among other Tidy Towns committees throughout Ireland. It won't work if only a handful of us respond. - Yours, etc., Malcolm MacDonald,
Banagher, Co Offaly.