East Wall Road is supposed to be cleaned each day, so why does dumped waste linger?

On 29 August, an illegally dumped bag of rubbish sat next to a pole on East Wall Road.

Local resident Ronan Waide had taken a picture of the same bag sitting in the same place on 26 August.  

This was after Waide had submitted a complaint on 24 August about it via the EPA's “See It? Say It!” app, he says. 

Yet, a Dublin City Council spokesperson said the council removes illegal dumping from East Wall Road every day. 

“The East Wall Road is mechanically swept on a daily basis usually around 6.00am in the morning,”  the council spokesperson said on 26 August. “Illegal Dumping is also removed every day.”

The spokesperson did not comment on photos taken of the same illegally dumped rubbish remaining on the street for days. 

Green Party Councillor Janet Horner says that it consistently comes up that people say the street cleaning is not happening, despite what the council says.

"I do think it needs a bit more of  an investigation to be honest, because I am not satisfied," she says.

Often, councillors are told the council is definitely addressing the issues, but then people notice something – perhaps they missed a few bags or something like that, Horner says. 

There are certainly a lot of complaints and a significant amount of evidence that suggests a need for further investigation into the system, she says. 

Over the past year or more, council officials have repeatedly announced plans to clean up the streets of the inner-city. In July – before their August break – councillors, sounding frustrated, asked when these plans were going to actually, finally, be put into action.

On Tuesday, the council published a press release announcing “the delivery of its 3 pillar Waste Management Strategy to deliver a cleaner city”, saying it had recruited more staff, expanded 24-hour cleaning zones, and more.

Rather than repeatedly announcing new plans and initiatives, “it’d be nice if the current plans worked”, Waide said. 

Feeling of futility

On 17 July, Waide sat at a table in his home, expressing frustration about the illegal dumping situation in his area.

He says he moved to the area in 2010. "The illegal dumping has been a constant  in the area for as long as I can remember," he said. 

"You would see people leaving bags of rubbish or even mattresses, and they would stay for days, weeks if no one reported them," he said.

Before Covid-19 arrived, and the world changed, there was a regular street cleaner on East Wall Road who would tidy up the same rubbish every day, Waide said. 

"During Covid, the cleaning stopped, and as far as I can tell, that service has not resumed," he said.

That’s because the person responsible for sweeping the streets in the area died, the council spokesperson said. 

“There was a general operative servicing this area with a handcart, but unfortunately, he passed away, and as of now, he has not been replaced,” the spokesperson said. 

More staff will be allocated to the area “in the near future”, they said. “When these become available, a handcart operative will again be assigned to assist in the cleanup alongside the other operatives who currently handle illegal dumping removals and mechanical road sweeping.”

In the meantime, Waide sends in his reports of illegally dumped rubbish to the council. Sometimes it gets cleaned up, “sometimes nothing happens. I still continue to report it," he said.

He shared reports he’d made on 16 November, 23 April, and 21 June, for example. 

The same illegally dumped waste often remains on East Wall Road for days or even weeks before council workers come to clean it up, he said. 

"It's a bit of an effort to report, and it feels like it's not worth it if nothing is going to happen," he said.

Most illegal dumping on any street is done by residents and businesses in that street, and so it can happen at any time of the day or night, the council spokesperson said. 

“We do not have the resources to constantly and repeatedly check the same roads multiple times a day," the spokesperson said.

Social Democrats Councillor Daniel Ennis, says he finds the council reacts very effectively to his calls when constituents in the north inner-city report illegal dumping to him, he says.

But "a lot of our measures at the moment are reactive”, Ennis says.  If there are cases of illegal dumping remaining on the streets even after they are reported, there’s also a problem with the council’s reactive measures, he says.

Opaque process

Waide said he was also concerned that some of the reports of illegal dumping that he submits online are marked as closed, even though the rubbish remains on the street. 

He shared via email some of the reports he had made, including of an illegally dumped pallet on 17 July.

The council marked the issue as  “complete” seconds after he placed the claim. "You can see "start date" and "completed date" are literally a second apart," he says.

“At this point I'm thinking the ‘Completed Date’ is of no value at all and the Case End Date is the important one,” he says. 

The same happened with a previous report.

The council spokesperson said that report was swiftly marked “complete” because it was closed by its Waste Management section, and forwarded to the council’s local area office for further investigation and action.

“It was actually closed off over 2 days later after it had been investigated by a Litter Warden," the spokesperson says. 

Waide says he’d rather the system tell him what the council is actually doing, rather than just that they are addressing it and not to worry about it.

But the council spokesperson says they don’t have time to give individual feedback on each report. 

"In 2025 to date we have received over 9,800 illegal dumping complaints alone and we do not have the available resources to provide individual feedback on every report logged," the spokesperson said.  

However, the council is now working on “a number of options that will see automatic updates given to any person who provided an email address at the time they logged a report that will see them automatically notified by email when a report has been closed off and the reason why it is closed”, they said. 

Impacts

Rubbish in the streets in the north inner-city affects Waide at home, he says. 

“We do  get a lot of rubbish blown into our backyard,” he says. “When I came back from work yesterday, I found litter scattered — not from people littering, but blown in by the wind”.

Waide said it makes him sad and angry to see all the rubbish and illegal dumping around the area.

“There are health aspects to it, there’s the visual amenity of the place, it's not nice to look at the window and see a bag of rubbish week on week".  

But mostly, there is the sense that someone is doing something wrong. “I'm just left with this sense of having some pride in your area,” he says.

By 2 September at 2pm, the bag of illegally dumped rubbish next to the pole on East Wall Road that Waide had reported to the council on 24 August was gone.