Jennifer O’Connell: Ireland is swimming in filth. Why do we tolerate it?

The attitude of Dubliners to the Poolbeg chimneys has always puzzled me.

The 1970s industrial behemoths are regarded with a fiercely defensive, romantic attachment, and immortalised on "mugs, T-shirts, key rings, calendars, cartoons, postcards, wood carvings, book covers, silk scarves, posters, paintings," as a letter writer to this newspaper recently pointed out. It is, she said, testament "to their enduring importance to Dublin Bay and in our hearts".

The chimneys are no Eiffel Tower, but that’s okay with Dubliners, who don’t much want to share them with tourists anyway. They’re happy to keep them as a beloved in-joke, a pin on the map that navigates you towards the water, a nod to the complex relationship between city and sea.

The reports for bathing spots classified as 'poor' make for nauseating reading

The fierce debate raging about the future of the stacks, and whether they should be encased in fibreglass, linked by a bridge, given a viewing platform or just put out of their misery, makes the relative silence about the toxic waste swirling beneath all the more startling.

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There has been far less discussion about the 8.9 million cubic metres – that’s 3,560 Olympic pools – of untreated waste that reportedly gushed into Dublin Bay over the last four years. The SOS Dublin Bay pressure group claims a fifth of swimmers believe they became ill as a result of the polluted water, although it isn’t clear how they know what made them sick. Still, it’s an unedifying thought: a bracing sunrise dip in other people’s excrement.

The rest of the country can’t be complacent either. According to the Water Advisory Body report published last September, 19 towns and cities don’t meet EU standards, and 33 towns and villages will still be discharging raw sewage into the sea beyond this year, because they don’t have a wastewater treatment plant.

Irish Water blames “historic underinvestment”, along with the need to support new housing and funding constraints, but the report was damning about the pace of progress. Irish Water is working to upgrade treatment facilities and investing €500 million in the Ringsend treatment plant. But it will be next year before the plant starts meeting the required standard; 2025 before the work is completed.

Meanwhile, Minister for Tourism Catherine Martin last week announced a Fáilte Ireland fund of €19 million to install showers and changing facilities at beaches and inland swimming spots, in an effort to encourage their year-round use. Hot showers after a swim aren't just a luxury in some places, they're a vital public health measure.

The pandemic has taught us that social cues can be created and overturned overnight. All it takes is a collective decision to establish new norms

Ireland has some of the most beautiful bathing spots in the world, and the water quality at three out of four is classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as "excellent" in 2019. But the reports for the ones classified as "poor" make for nauseating reading.

The Front Strand at Balbriggan in Dublin had high levels of E.coli and intestinal enterococci in August last year, and swimmers are advised to avoid it this year.

“Known pressures” include sewage discharges. Clifden beach in Galway is permanently closed to swimming after five years of poor ratings, caused by storm water overflow and possible discharges from septic tanks. Swimmers are advised to avoid the popular Caherciveen beach Cúas Crom for the entire 2021 season. Traces of E.coli were detected at Sandycove in August last year, though it was still rated “good”.

And that’s just the pollution we know about – water quality at swimming spots is currently only monitored from June to mid-September. The rationale for not testing year-round seems to be that if we knew how bad it was we might actually have to do something.

Minister for Local Government Darragh O'Brien said monitoring may be extended but there are "significant considerations", one of which was the "reality that poor weather during winter months will likely lead to more frequent bathing prohibitions". What swimmers don't know won't hurt them, although it might make them very sick.

The lack of a public outcry about this seems to be symptomatic of something deeper in our psyche – a kind of collective shoulder-shrug when it comes to ownership of our public spaces. We've been spending small fortunes doing what Minister for Higher Education Simon Harris called "dickying up" our homes and gardens in lockdown – Ikea in Ballymun remains one of its most profitable anywhere – but for too many people, that pride vanishes beyond their front gate. You could spout all kinds of theories about a national dearth of civic-mindedness, but the truth is we're simply accustomed to a level of squalor that isn't tolerated in other countries.

Australians are no more socially responsible than Irish people in ways, but they take their litter home from the beach. The pristine public toilets and barbecue areas there seem like a small miracle to newly-arrived Irish people, but there’s no magic involved. Australians don’t litter for the same reason many Irish people do: it’s about social cues.

It isn’t that we no longer see the rubbish discarded on hedgerows, the masks dropped on streets, or the dog excrement on footpaths, it’s just that we don’t tend to see it as our problem. Any number of litter studies internationally have shown that when people see litter, they deduce that littering is acceptable.

The pandemic has taught us that social cues can be created and overturned overnight. All it takes is a collective decision to establish new norms. Fourteen months ago, we stopped shaking hands and started wearing masks. We could solve the litter problem by next week if enough of us wanted to.

Cleaning up our swimming spots will take a bit more than tutting at strangers in the park, but it won’t happen at all until we demand it. Imagine the kind of Ireland we could have if we treated the filth we’re swimming in like the public health crisis it actually is.