“So the council is allowing horses in Dublin City,” says horse owner David Mulraney. “But they’re not allowing them to put their horse manure anywhere.”
John Behan marched down Molyneux Lane to his stable just behind Cappello, the Italian restaurant, on Thomas Street.
As he rolled the shutters up, Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” was playing on the radio and one of his two horses, Billy, snorted and gave the wooden door into his enclosure a good kick.
Billy, and his horsemate Dell, share the stable with Behan’s carriage and some budgies in cages mounted to the walls.
Behan has been operating out of here for 20 years, he says.
Before he arrived at these stables, he had been up on the Dublin-Meath border, he says, while using a red plastic scoop to fill a bucket with horse feed. “This side of Ashbourne.”
In the two decades since he moved into Molyneux Yard, the number of horses has steadily decreased. “There was 50 horses at one time,” he says. “Back in the day there would’ve been.”
Today, he has his horses, while next-door, there are three more, he says.
The owners of the neighbouring stable weren’t in. But outside their wooden doors, there were more than 80 plastic bags, most of which were stuffed with manure.
They dispose of the manure themselves, a spokesperson for the council said on Tuesday afternoon.
Behan does the same. There isn’t a single, straightforward way for horse owners to properly get rid of their waste.
Behan takes all the manure from his horses up to a plot of land in Coolmine, he says. “They have a big vegetable plot up there. They’d make their own compost. That’s where it goes.”
Until last year, however, he brought all of his manure up to the council’s bring centre in Sweeney’s Terrace, he says, pausing a moment while Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” came on the radio.
“Let me see now. I think it was after Christmas. January or February” 2025 that the change came, he says.
The bring centre is roughly a kilometre south of the stables, behind Mill Street.
He had used it for years, he says. “And it happened in the blink of an eye.”
All the horse owners would go up there on a Tuesday morning, said David Mulraney, the owner of Mulraney’s Carriages, over the phone on Tuesday morning. “They go before 12 o’clock. And then, one day, the lads went down to dump the manure, and they said they weren’t taking any more.”
This change has been a massive frustration for residents of the Liberties who are now seeing a lot more manure left in bags along the sides of streets, says Sinn Féin Councillor Ciaran Ó Meachair.
He’s been talking to carriage operators, local residents and businesses, he said on the phone. “They’re complaining about it. I mean, I’ve been seeing plastic bags of it being dumped with my own eyes around the Basin Street area.”
Indeed, collecting the manure at the depot at Sweeney’s Terrace meant people could dispose of it responsibly, says Labour Councillor Darragh Moriarty. “Rather than let it be strewn across the city roads.
“Now, Dublin City Council maintains that it was a very informal, casual relationship,” he says. “But I was warned at the time that, if the owners had no place to dispose of this, it would be dumped illegally.”
Dublin City Council never had an arrangement in place for the collection of horse manure, either in the Liberties or in any other area, a spokesperson for the council said in mid-January.
They did operate the horse manure disposal service up at Sweeney’s Terrace, subject to a charge, they said. “This service was discontinued, primarily due to health and safety concerns relating to access to and from the depot and the storage of manure containers.”
Horse owners are required to make their own arrangements for the disposal of manure by delivering it to a waste disposal facility that is willing to accept it, they said.
But this has created a problem for a lot of the stables, Behan says. “Not for us. But some of the boys who worked on the north side, they used it a lot because they’ve a lot of horses.”
A spokesperson for Comfort Carriages said via text on Monday evening that they used it too, but now have a private contractor who takes their manure.
Mulraney uses his own farm now in Bettystown for dumping manure, he says. “We’re lucky. But them people have been using them premises for 30 years now.”
“So the council is allowing horses in Dublin city,” he says. “But they’re not allowing them to put their horse manure anywhere.”
Veteran horse owners have approached the council, asking if there was some alternative option, he says. “Even if there was a bin left outside the place, or somewhere you could pay the council to take it from the yard.”
But they haven’t been able to get the council to agree to that, he says.
A spokesperson for the council did not respond when asked on Tuesday if it would reconsider accepting manure at the depot in the future.
Down Molyneux Lane on Saturday 17 January, the walls were lined with plastic bags loaded up with manure.
There were about 40 bags. And by the following Friday, 23 January, there were 60.
On Tuesday morning, 3 February, the number of bags exceeded 80.
Owners currently dispose of the manure themselves, a council spokesperson said. “Waste management do not remove manure from this location.”
Moriarty, the Labour councillor, says that it’s notable also that the council hasn’t directed horse owners towards appropriate places for the disposal of their manure. Just cut them off.
Until they can offer alternatives, the loss of a facility like that which was offered up in Sweeney’s Terrace is going to continue to make problems, he says. “Because there’s literally nowhere for the shit to go. It’s gonna roll downhill somewheres.”
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