Council Briefs: Prohibiting swimming at Sandymount, expanding street cleaning, banning single-use cups in parks

Prohibition on swimming at Sandymount Strand

The council plans to warn people against swimming at Sandymount Strand this summer, a council official said recently.

The anticipated 2024 classification for bathing water quality at the beach is “poor”, a drop from “sufficient” last year, said Emma Finlay, senior executive engineer at the Water Pollution Control Section.

Dublin City Council “will now have to raise a season-long temporary prohibition”, Finlay told the council’s Climate Action, Environment and Energy Strategic Policy Committee on 27 March. The bathing season runs from 1 June to 15 September each year.

It plans to put up signs saying “Warning: Do not swim: Swimming in this water may cause illness”.

“The public are strongly encouraged to heed the warning raised in the interest of bather health, but the public is free to swim where they wish as this is advise only,” a council spokesperson said Monday.

Normally, not many people actually swim at the beach but they do go in the water, the spokesperson said. “Due to the flat profile, tidal and shallow waters of Sandymount Strand, bathing numbers are exceptionally low,” she said. “Rather, paddling is a popular activity at this location.”

The downgrade of the water quality at Sandymount isn’t because of poor test results recently, or even last year, Finlay said. It’s based on a four-year running average of test results, she explained, during a presentation to the committee.

In 2019, water quality was very good at Sandymount, but now that year has dropped out of the four used to calculate the average – so it’s fallen to “poor”, Finlay said. Even though last summer the water quality there was actually good, she said.

Analysis of the sources of pollution that have led to poor test results at Sandymount over the years shows that the biggest one is dog poo, Roy O’Connor, senior engineer in the Protection of Water Bodies Office, told the committee.

“A little over 55 percent of our poor results are directly attributable to dog fouling on Sandymount Beach,” O’Connor said.

“If they were removed overnight, you would then end up with probably some of the best bathing water quality across all of the bathing sites in Dublin Bay – solved, overnight,” he said.

A single dog poo can contaminate water in an area the size of a tennis court, if it is as shallow as Merrion Strand and Sandymount Strand, Wim Meijer, a professor of microbiology at University College Dublin, has said.

Another 20 percent of the problem with the water quality at Sandymount is due to “bird activity”, said O’Connor, at the committee meeting. And 25–30 percent is from problems with drainage infrastructure, which the council is working to address, he said.

Green Party Councillor Donna Cooney said at the meeting that she was disappointed to hear about the prohibition on swimming  at Sandymount. “I thought we were going to make progress but this seems to be the opposite,” she said.

Meanwhile, a task force set up to try to improve the bathing water quality at nearby Merrion Strand continues to work to bring it back up to sufficient quality, Finlay said.

The council changed its classification in 2020 to make it no longer a designated bathing water after water quality was found to be poor there for five years running.

Despite these prohibitions at Sandymount and Merrion strands, O’Connor told the committee that “Just in terms of the perception that things are declining in Dublin Bay, I can tell you that they’re actually improving overall.”

The waters closest to shore, where people swim, are impacted by pollution from the city, the council spokesperson said.

“Research has confirmed that bathing locations in Dublin Bay are impacted by near shore pressures, including but not limited to misconnections, dog fouling, urban waste water and urban runoff,” she said.

But there are signs of improvement even close to the shore, the spokesperson said.

Evidence that water quality is slowly improving includes “designation of Half Moon bathing location in South Dublin Bay, no Poor results at Sandymount Strand in 2023 bathing season and the reversal of the water quality trend at Merrion Strand which was in decline up to 2019 and now is showing incremental signs of improvement”, she said.

Expanding city street sweeping

The council plans to clean more of the city’s streets more often, Barry Woods, a senior engineer at the council, told the environment committee on 27 March.

At the moment, the council provides a 24-hour street cleaning and bin-emptying service in the city centre’s commercial district, Wood said. The zone for that service is 2.7  square kilometres, he said.

In this zone three shifts of council staff work to keep the streets clean, Woods said. In contrast, in the suburbs, there’s one fully staffed shift from 6am to 2pm, and then a skeleton crew is on in the afternoons, he said.

The council plans to expand the 24-hour service zone to cover 3.7sq km of the city centre, he said, although he didn’t give a timeline for that expansion. That’s an increase of about 37 percent.

It’ll mean stepping up from emptying 650 litter bins as part of this service, to perhaps 950 litter bins, Woods said.

The additional parts of the city that would get a 24-hour service would include parts of the north-east inner-city, parts of the Markets neighbourhood near Smithfield, and parts of Thomas Street, and Baggot Street, he said.

Dublin City Council has been recruiting for general operatives, Woods said. It’s had 900 applications so far, he said.

From these, the waste management section hopes to recruit about 100 staff over the course of this year, Woods said.

They’ll be posted across the city, with the first new hires going to the city centre, the next to the north-east inner-city, and then additional staff to the suburbs, he said.

Fine Gael Councillor Naoise Ó Muirí made a pitch for putting more resources into keeping the suburbs clean.

“Suburban areas are falling way behind in terms of street sweeping resources,” Ó Muirí said. People living in the suburbs rarely see any street cleaning at all, he said.

Woods said the focus would be on expanding the area covered by the 24-hour city-centre service. But that would help the suburbs, too, he said, as it would leave less territory to be cleaned by the suburban crews.

The council recently put out a tender to buy a new fleet of vehicles for street cleaning, Woods said. Half of these will be smaller and electric, he said. The other half will be “low emissions”, the tender says.

Ditching reusable cups

The council will look into requiring that tea rooms and coffee docks in its parks offer only reusable cups, council executive manager Derek Kelly said.

He made the commitment in response to a motion tabled by Green Party Councillor Carolyn Moore, at the environment committee meeting on 27 March.

“We’re moving quite rapidly to facilitate tea rooms and different kinds of coffee and food vendors to operate in our parks,” Moore said, pitching the motion.“We are kind of actively and knowingly creating this new source of litter in our parks.”

So the council should “just say we are not going to allow people to sell single-use cups or beverage containers in our parks, because the chance that it’s just going to end up as litter is just too high”, she said.

The council could make this a condition for new licences it offers to operate coffee docks and tea rooms, the motion said.

The council has a programme of tendering for operators to open and operate coffee docks with public toilets, in its  parks – as a way of toilets to the public without the council having to operate them itself.

However, that programme has run into some difficulties. Some of the businesses that signed on to that scheme later cut the number of days that they were open, including Eamonn Ceannt Park in Crumlin and others shut down altogether. Some promised locations never got off the ground, too, like Clontarf Promenade.

Moore said that the new requirement for tea room and coffee dock operators wouldn’t mean “handing out ceramic cups”. “There are plenty now of reusable cups and reusable cup systems on the go,” she said.

There is a “borrow cup” service, Vytal, operating around Clontarf that works well, Green Party Councillor Donna Cooney said. “There are already means to do this.”

Green Party Councillor Claire Byrne said she supported the motion, and wanted to go further by also banning the sale of single-use plastics from tea rooms and coffee docks in council parks. Water could be sold in cans or tetrapacks instead, she said.

Robert Moss suggested offering incentives to operators who do these things. For example, the licence fee they pay the council for operating in the park could be reduced, he said.

“We can use a carrot rather than a stick and say, ‘Okay if you’re going to do your operations using only reusable materials, no disposable plastics, then you get a big discount,” said Moss, who is An Taisce’s Green Communities Programme manager, and sits on the environment committee.

“That’ll focus minds, and a business entrepreneur might come up with an idea much more quickly than we could,” he said.

Kelly, the executive manager, told the committee members that talk with the council’s parks department, and its Culture, Recreation and Economic Services (CRES) department about what putting the idea into practice would involve – and report back.

Said Moore, who’d proposed the motion: “I’m happy for this to be investigated further and for this to be fleshed out a bit.”