Councillors ask when long-standing plans to reduce rubbish on the city streets will be live

In February 2024, Barry Woods, Dublin City Council’s head of waste management, told councillors about plans to move more city residents and businesses away from waste bags and over to waste bins. 

In September 2024, Woods said the council was about to sign a contract for cameras to monitor illegal dumping hotspots in the north-inner city.

In February 2025, Woods said waste compactors were to be set up at St Stephens Green and in Temple Bar within weeks, to allow the council to end the use of plastic bags for rubbish collection in 90 streets.

On Tuesday, Dublin city councillors asked how much longer they would have to wait for these – and other – long-promised measures to help clean up city-centre streets. 

Oh, and had the 24-hour street cleaning been extended to some streets on the north side as previously promised, asked the Lord Mayor, Fine Gael Councillor Ray McAdam, at the meeting of councillors for the city’s Central Area Committee. 

At the meeting, councillors lamented multiple missed deadlines for rolling out projects. They’re the ones telling people the timelines, they said. 

“There is no point in providing indicative timelines to councillors if these timelines cannot be met,” said McAdam. 

Woods said he’s still committed to all the projects he had presented to the full council last September. “We are totally committed to delivering a cleaner city and to reducing illegal dumping.”

Those included 100 more street cleaning staff, doing more power washing of streets, setting up a rapid response team to clear up illegal dumping, and extending 24-hour street cleaning to more streets in the city centre. 

(A spokesperson for the press office on Wednesday wouldn’t clarify which streets are currently cleaned around the clock, and which will be going forward.  “We don't wish to comment on this at the minute, we'll have more information to share in a few weeks”.)

At Tuesday’s meeting Woods also restated promises to remove permission for people to leave out rubbish in plastic bags, and to start installing compactors for businesses to put their rubbish in for areas where wheelie bins aren’t practical. 

But, Woods said, the council has faced delays for a variety of reasons – including power-supply issues and data-protection concerns.

What happened to the compactors?

In September 2023, councillors on the Central Area Committee agreed a motion tabled by Green Party Councillor Janet Horner declaring a litter and dumping emergency in the north inner-city. 

One problem is that homes and businesses on some central streets don’t have space for wheelie bins. So residents and businesses leave rubbish for collection in plastic bags. The bags get ripped, and rubbish blows around. 

“Bags don’t work,” said Fianna Fáil Councillor John Stephens, at the meeting on Tuesday. “Seagulls come down, they tear the bags, no matter how much you try and regulate it.”

Horner said she had cycled down Capel Street the previous night and seen rubbish strewn all over. 

“It is terrible for wildlife to be consuming that,” she said. “It makes the streets so antisocial and hostile for people walking on them.”

The council wasn’t pushing projects through urgently enough, said Horner. “I’m very concerned by the lack of timescales, the lack of urgency and the lack of leadership to actually solve these problems for this part of the city.”

Rubbish was making the city centre seem unsafe and unlivable, she said. Several councillors said they agreed. 

In February 2024, Woods said that the council planned to push more city residents to switch from bags to bins for rubbish. 

The council had started to examine the roughly 900 streets across the city with a “derogation” – with an eye to removing as many as possible of these exemptions from the rule that people should leave out rubbish in wheelie bins.

In February 2025, Woods told local councillors that the council was about to remove the derogation from around 90 streets in the south inner city.

“We’re ready to go live with that very, very shortly,” he says. “That means that businesses and residents in that area will no longer be allowed to present their waste in plastic bags.”

The council had identified locations for compactors,at St Stephen’s Green and Temple Bar, he said. 

Woods said at the meeting on Tuesday that the compactors will be in place soon. “The compactors should be in place within the next four to six weeks.”

Once they are, the council will remove the derogation from 90 streets in the south inner-city, from Temple Bar and Westmoreland Street to Grafton Street and over to Fitzwilliam Street, he said. 

Those who can’t use wheelie bins and who don’t sign up for a new system whereby they hand over waste directly to the waste collection company, can get rid of their rubbish in the compactors. 

The council had to get approval from ESB to hook up power to the compactors, said Woods Tuesday.

That was delayed because the ESB was under pressure following Storm Eowyn, he said, referring to the extreme storm that hit Ireland on 24 January, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of customers across the country.

“They [ESB] have now given us approval for the compactors and we are now planning the civil and electrical works to install the compactors at the two locations for the first phase,” he said. 

This will be a pilot in the south inner-city first, he said. They don’t know where on the northside may later get compactors, he said, but that should also be done before the end of this year. 

Independent Councillor Cieran Perry asked why some actions couldn’t be done simultaneously. 

Woods said the council wants to learn from pilots before moving on.

Not watching yet

In September 2024, Woods had said at the full council meeting that the council would soon install cameras in illegal dumping hotspots at Belvedere Place, Sherrard Street Lower and Summer Street North. 

“We’re just about to sign a contract with a service provider for that scheme,” he said. “We’re only a matter of weeks away from the first erection of the first CCTV scheme.”

At Tuesday’s committee meeting, councillors wanted to know what the hold-up is.

“We’re annoyed that it hasn’t happened quicker as well,” said Woods. But there was an issue with how to power the cameras, he said.

Council officials had thought they could run them from street lights, he said, but some of the public lighting infrastructure also powers traffic lights. 

The concern was that if CCTV cameras were vandalised, it could knock off traffic lights, he said, so the council has to install separate poles for cameras. 

They’re now to be solar-operated, but that may impact their effectiveness, said Green Party councillors Janet Horner and Feljin Jose.

Lights on solar-powered zebra crossings don’t always work on overcast days, said Horner. 

Woods said that only cameras in “phase 1” – Belvedere Place, Sherrard Street Lower and Summer Street North -  are to be solar-powered. Future cameras will be supplied by mains electricity, he said.

Now, the council expects to have the first three cameras installed within a month, said a council report at the meeting, and it will move to install more cameras “immediately” after. 

The next phase is CCTV at bring banks and textile banks with a history of illegal dumping, the report said. 

Targeting households

A further council plan is to use data from waste-collection companies on who has contracts with them, to target residents without bin contracts. 

If they cannot prove that they disposed of their waste legally, the council can seek to prosecute.

In March, Woods said that the project was set to kick off in the coming weeks. That raised questions around data protection, although an expert said they could do it as long as they  show that it is necessary and proportionate.

Now, Tuesday’s report to the Central Area Committee said that “the project is at an early stage, where the preparation of the detailed Data Protection Impact Assessment is currently being compiled”.

At the meeting, Woods said the council has to do GDPR assessments or they won’t be able to bring prosecutions successfully.  

Dublin City Council has contracted a company called Amtivo to engage with the waste collection agencies and the occupiers of buildings in Dublin 1, 3 and 7, as illegal dumping is particularly prevalent in these areas, says the report. 

Amtivo will put together a list of households that do have a contract, said Woods. They’ll scrub personal details, and use the list to work back and create a list of those that don’t have a bin contract. 

The council’s CEO, Richard Shakespeare, has to sign off on the scheme before Amtivo starts seeking data from waste collectors, says the report.  

“Since I was elected a couple of hundred years ago this has been an issue in the area,” said Perry, the independent councillor at the meeting. “I think the reverse register will be hugely significant.”

Shared bins

Woods said that the council has agreement from waste collection companies to trial a  shared bin project to get rid of bagged waste on terraced streets. 

The idea is to set up a covered space for communal bins at the end of a street, to serve two or three neighbouring streets. 

Waste-collection companies have agreed that all of those houses can use the one company, which will collect from the communal bin, says Woods. 

“We hope to run it for three to six months,” he said. If it works the council could roll it out in more places, he said.