Your litter is yours - deal with it, please
By Barbara Daly
LAST week I wrote about volunteerism and how if we all just gave one hour of our time we could achieve so much.
Likewise if we were all more responsible then so many volunteer hours would not be wasted on thankless, unnecessary tasks.
My neighbour is part of a local group of women who swim every morning of the year at Old Head Beach in Louisburgh.
As a way of giving thanks for the beautiful resource they enjoy each day, they collect rubbish along the beach after their swim.
Old Head recently regained its Blue Flag status after 12 years without it, thanks in no small part to the efforts of this group to clean up their local beach.
It is a stunningly picturesque place and is ideal for swimming, walking, watersports and so much more.
One day recently, after a weekend day of good weather, she told me how her and her group of sea swimmers spent an hour and a half that morning collecting rubbish from the beach.
They ended up filling six large black bags. This included all sorts of beach paraphernalia that people had discarded such as towels, swimwear and beach toys.
Then of course there was the litter, like the cigarette butts left on the wall beside the cigarette bins instead of being put in the bins.
She said that they could have cried they were so upset and disgusted by the state of the beach.
I was upset for her and angry too.
How dare people be so irresponsible, so wasteful and so abusive of this fabulous natural resource?
How dare they inflict this unpleasant job on these women every morning?
Why are Irish people still so reluctant to deal with and pay for the disposal of their own rubbish?
I have witnessed people pull up in their cars at the public bins in my town and furtively stuff a bag of their household rubbish into the bin and drive off.
I have seen them do this to the large bins outside the school on bin day. This culture of refusing to take home our own rubbish with us or to pay for disposing it is still very prevalent in our society.
Getting back to the beaches, it is a ridiculous waste of precious volunteer time to be collecting the waste of others from a beach, after these ‘others’ have enjoyed a day at that beach.
It makes a mockery of the volunteers.
Of course there will always be some rubbish washed up on our shores, at least until we reduce our use of plastics and consume less.
However for a family or a group of friends to get up from their spot on the beach after a lovely day out and leave their litter and their unwanted beach gear behind them is nothing short of criminal.
OK, so enough ranting.
What is the solution, if any? CCTV? More litter wardens? More fines? More bins for people to stuff more of their rubbish in? Maybe. But how about personal responsibility, education, a culture change?
Make it socially unacceptable to dispose of rubbish in a public place. Make it frowned upon, in fact let’s pull each other up on it. Let’s teach our children that this behaviour is never, ever acceptable.
Next time you visit a beach, leave no trace, because remember if you do, my neighbour and her friends and many others like them will be picking it up for you.
And wouldn’t that be shameful.