A Load of Rubbish

23rd Mar 2012

Well gone are the desperate commercial floats from the Paddy’s Day Parade – no longer do Cork smallies have to stand coughing as diesel fumes are blasted into their lungs by heaving giant articulated trucks (a single tiny tricolour in the windscreen the fruits of their paltry efforts to doll up their vehicles).

Along with the lorries, environment crushing jeeps would blare out the “latest hits” from an ear splitting tannoy mounted on their roofs – a wall of piercing noise that would annoy the deaf.
 

Nowadays our parade is a much cleaner and clearer display of the local community groups that make up the city rather than a dull din of irritating and boring brand awareness drives.

From energetic African groups to proud-as-punch GAA clubs the march around town is now something to take pride in so hats off to the organisers. Our footnote on it’s report card would be that the parade was perhaps a little too quiet. A few more bands and bongo bangers might be the icing on the cake.

City Council might be operating on a budget tighter than Paul Galvin’s pants but something has obviously changed here too over the last few years. When the last float zips by an army of street cleaners descend on the route purging it of the tons of litter left behind in a matter of minutes. With a growing reputation as a top tourist destination the last thing any local wants to see is visitors tripping over swathes of filth.  

On seeing the man power deployed after the parade to scoop up the filth left behind a feen can’t help but wonder about the amount our city spends on cleaning up litter and what else could be done with the money if people simply put rubbish in bins instead of casually dropping them on the ground without a second thought.

The logic from those who don’t think twice about tossing empty plastic bottles and junk food wrappers on the ground might be that the money would only be spent on dolling up City Hall (the Lorda’s office just got a new €17,000 carpet as part of a €250,000 spring clean) or giving a gardening celebrity immoral amounts of cash to throw a few plants on pallet.

Councillor Kieran McCarthy has a good set of snaps of this year's parade on his facebook - click here

Maybe if the sages at City Hall could come up with a way of linking savings from litter collection in certain areas to the level of investment in those same areas we might be on to a winner.

Communities have to take some responsibility for the cleanliness of their own streets and estates but local leaders are needed to organise clean up groups – a lot of it depends on the will power of councillors in your area. If yours is messy, stop looking at it and just clean up but let your local councillors know that you’re doing it and that could do with a hand too.

There are sharp contrasts between many communities within a mile or two of the city centre. Some are well kept, neat and tidy while others feature waves of litter that wouldn’t be out of place in that famous TV advert that pleaded with Irish people to not fling their shite around the place.

Punters in pubs flick cigarettes and packaging into the street with abandon even though many venues have wall-mounted ashtrays. These ‘couldn’t-be-bothereds’ enrage anyone with a bit of pride in Cork and we can’t allow them to think it’s grand to fire rubbish into the street for ‘someone else’ to pick up.

Places like Sunday’s Well where you regularly see trails of brightly anoraked tourists are notorious for dog dirt despite impotent signs threatening €150 fines if your mut is nabbed in the act. Very little of this mess can be attributed to strays – it’s often our own neighbours and friends, that turn a blind eye don’t clean up after their beloveds. 
 

Small businesses are going to have to step up to the plate a lot more too. If they were obliged to clean up ten metres either side of their front doors or face a fine the city’s scorecard would look at lot healthier – especially in areas outside the city centre island.
 

The councils have a responsibility to keep Cork clean too though and not every area of the city has residents or nearby businesses. The first few miles of motorway in and out of the city feature an embarrassing amount of rubbish along the verges. The Mallow Road is poor too.

Community clean-ups can’t reach this far and the taxpayer paid authorities have to step up to the mark here especially as we were warned about this in previous litter surveys. How many unemployed fellas could you get cleaning up litter for €250,000?

Many road signs are in bad shape too, even in the city centre – there’s a huge one at the end of MacCurtain Street that looks like it hasn’t been scrubbed since the name of the thoroughfare was changed from King Street. It’s so mouldy someone should carbon-14 date it and we might be able to make a tourist attraction out of the results!

An Taisce are currently organising the national spring clean up.

See www.nationalspringclean.org/ or contact your local residents’ organisation and get stuck in.