Our attitudes to wasting water and rivers of human waste a dirty shame

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that as a society we have closed our eyes to our own crap, writes Victoria White

THEY’RE calling it “the chocolate fountain”. Whenever there’s heavy rainfall the Dodder Valley sewer overflows through the manhole beside Balrothery Weir in Firhouse in Dublin 24. Local residents have shown me pictures of a sewage lake and a sewage river flowing towards the River Dodder where it is at its most beautiful. There’s a mound of toilet paper stuck to the bank to prove the point.

“I still feel worried even walking down here, but there’s been a lot of rain,” says the local man who’s showing me the bank. But the thing that really worries him is seeing kids playing in the stones which have been bathed in the overflow. He says the Council’s response was to surround the manhole with a temporary fence which wasn’t exactly effective against rushing water.