“Any blue bags that are there, we're not sure who's giving them out.”
Sinn Féin Councillor Edel Moran asked for a bit of clarity.
“I’ve had a couple of residents on about the blue bags,” said Moran, at Monday’s North Central Area Committee meeting. “Do you collect them? Don’t you collect them?”
She was talking about the blue bags branded with the council’s logo that are sometimes stuffed and left on the side of the street.
From the end of a long table, the council’s area manager, Derek Farrell, kind of answered a different question, which raised more.
“The blue bags, we don't give out anymore. So, any blue bags that are there, we're not sure who's giving them out,” said Farrell.
Those bags that are still found all over the place are left by people who are getting them off somebody, Farrell said, and then using them to dump their own household waste.
They used to be given to resident associations for green waste – like leaves and grass – during community cleanups, he said. But the council swapped them out six or seven years ago and now provide different-looking bags for litter or leaves.
A spokesperson for Dublin City Council said that they partly dropped the blue bags for community cleanups to reduce the possibility that their use may be abused, and partly for operational reasons.
Council workers still use the blue bags for daily jobs such as emptying litter bins, the council spokesperson said.
At Monday’s meeting, meanwhile, councillors batted around theories as to how these bags are still appearing all over their area.
There’s likely an innocent explanation for the blue bag misuse, said Councillor Micheál Mac Donncha of Sinn Féin, at the area meeting.
Rolls of the bags were probably given out over the years, he said, and some people simply still have them and think it’s okay to use them for their own leaves and grass – and perhaps even innocently handed them out to neighbours.
Said Farrell, the area manager: “I think the last time we gave them out was about six, seven years ago, so if people still have rolls of them, then fair play.”
Donna Cooney, a Green Party councillor, took a harder line against the mystery blue baggers.
She regularly encounters blue bags when she is out with her Tidy Towns group cleaning up, she says. They are often full of garden waste, but also other materials, she said.
A minority of unscrupulous companies and individuals, she said, are causing a terrible nuisance by abusing the system.
“And there's nothing worse than a load of smelly stuff left in a bag on your road and on your street corners,” said Cooney.
“By law, regardless, if it’s a black bag or a Dublin City Council blue bag, it's technically illegal dumping,” said Daryl Barron, a Fianna Fáil councillor, who is chair of the area committee, by phone on Tuesday.
“The bags are appearing everywhere,” he said.
Whatever the reason, said Barron, the council is having to spend a lot of money on stuff that should really be going into people's brown bins.
Barron said he couldn’t give an exact cost. (A council spokesperson said they couldn’t either.)
But those bags aren’t cheap to remove, said Barron.
The random contents of the blue bags abandoned on the street is so mixed that it often can’t be put with the green waste for compost, said Cooney, at the meeting. “We're paying for them effectively to go to the incinerator.”
While the blue bags are out of commission for community cleanups, that doesn’t mean the council gives no bags out for that, said Farrell.
Resident associations can still get different bags for that, he said.
Moran, the Sinn Féin councillor, asked whether less formal groups than resident associations could also avail of the programme if they want to help tidy up their area.
That’s possible, said Farrell. But they have to speak first to the council’s public-domain team.
Normally, they do have to be part of a group, he said, but they don’t have to hold AGMs and so on. “It's just that we're making sure that we're not giving bags out to people who are going to just dump their own stuff.”
Moran pointed to confusion over the use of the Dublin City Council Citizen Hub, where people can register to have bags from community cleanups collected by council workers.
Farrell said, again, that any residents’ group, or similar, needs to talk to the public domain team first and that outside of that, people can’t just leave out bags and then contact the hub for them to be collected.
MacDonncha, the Sinn Féin councillor, said the council needed to push out information as soon as possible, clarifying its position on blue bags and community cleanups – before the autumn leaves fall.
At the meeting, Farrell, the area manager, mused on how far afield the blue bags had travelled. “I’ve seen Dublin City Council blue bags in Meath,” he said.
Barron, the committee chair, ended the discussion on an ominous note.
“I could actually track it to one resident group in a certain area. I know who it is. It's not in the area office … but I know who it is,” he said.
Later, on the phone, he declined to rat out his suspects … just yet.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
The doors of the two-storey blocks at St Anne's Court are now boarded over. All doors, that is, but three.
It’ll be used by more than the football team, said club committee member Keith O’Connell, but open to other local groups and a youth club too.
“We're going to develop different urban trial hedgerows,” says Sophie von Maltzan. “The edible hedgerow, and the not-so-fast-growing hedgerow, and the thorn-free hedge.”
Fingal County Council launched a feasibility study in 2017. But the project still requires further study, a spokesperson said this week.
