Dublin Council suggests discrepancy in IBAL survey

Dublin City Council has said the Irish Business Against Litter (IBALl) survey which found Dublin to be the State’s worst “litter black spot” came to inappropriate conclusions.

Matt Twomey, the assistant city manager highlighted a key difference between the Ibal survey and others such as the National Survey carried out by the Department of the Environment. This was that IBAL only visited the Finglas area on a Saturday afternoon.

“The National Survey did it over a week and found high levels of cleanliness. The city council carries out cleaning at weekends from 6pm to 10pm. The IBAL survey is a snapshot taken before cleaning began,” he said.
Mr Twomey said that Dublin would spend E20 million in 2006 on cleaning. This is an increase of E5 million in recent years. He said that because streets like Grafton Street had 30 million pedestrian movements every day, it was impossible to clean them at high trading times. Assessing the cleanliness of streets like Moore Street when the markets were in session were therefore unfair. These streets were cleaned up when the markets closed.

Mr Twomey said that “more reliable snapshots” were based on continuous assessment. The IBAL survey came after a Failte Ireland survey. It found that litter was one of the main sources of dissatisfaction among visitors to Ireland.