Areas not on tourist radar ‘neglected’ in bid to fight litter

Local authorities showing favouritism to tourism and retail hotspots has left neighbourhoods without the necessary supports to fight litter, business leaders said.

Irish Business Against Litter (IBAL) believes that while clean streets are essential to attract tourists and shoppers, it is not good enough to focus purely where footfall and spending is highest.

Spokesman Conor Horgan said: “Areas that are not on the tourist radar tend to be neglected by the local authority. We feel everyone has the right to a clean environment but residential areas are being left behind.”

He said the abolition of town councils is probably also partly to blame for low- profile areas being left out of street-cleaning efforts.

IBAL yesterday gave its highest annual award to Kildare town, the best of 13 towns and cities deemed to have reached standards of cleanliness and freedom from litter that are better than agreed European norms for urban centres of their size.

However, while individual results were good, the overall performance from the 40 towns and cities inspected dipped from recent years.

Some 70% were rated as clean in 2016, either reaching or exceeding European norms, compared to 80% in 2014, and there was a 4% increase in the presence of litter year-on-year. “It’s not big but it’s a cause for concern,” said Mr Horgan.

Casual and thoughtless littering, initially IBAL’s primary focus, has given way to deliberate dumping as the chief concern.

“The problem is becoming less about cleaning up after kids have dropped sweet papers on the main street. It’s about people deliberately and covertly evading bin charges by illegally disposing of their rubbish on wasteland or derelict sites,” said Mr Horgan.

The annual IBAL league table is confined to 40 areas, with different towns and districts within cities being chosen each year to replace others that have become consistently good performers and no longer require yearly monitoring.

Jennifer Ward, head of marketing with the Irish Hotels Federation, a major supporter of IBAL, said that making litter-free the norm was the idea that drove the initiative when it was started 20 years ago: “Foreign direct investment, food exports, and tourism all hinged on Ireland being seen as a clean country. Back in 1996, it clearly wasn’t. The change we have witnessed over the past two decades has been remarkable. When IBAL published its first litter survey only two towns were deemed clean to European norms. Now three-quarters are clean.”

The league is compiled on the basis of monitoring and inspection reports provided by An Taisce. The top five for 2016 were Kildare, Roscommon, Ashbourne, Waterford City, and Thurles.

The lower ranked were rated moderately littered, littered or seriously littered, as was the case of the bottom three: Dublin North Inner City, Farranree (Cork City) and Galvone (Limerick City).