In Mulhuddart, residents volunteering to pick litter in Tolka Valley Park frustrated at being left to empty the council’s bins too

Just north of Mulhuddart sits a particularly wild stretch of the Tolka Valley Park.

Young gorse plants are growing in the meadow, with its pathways marked by trampled down grass and weeds.

But, on Tuesday afternoon, scattered among the wildflowers and long grass are cans, yoghurt pots, bike and pram wheels, and a shopping trolley. The leg of a table floats down one of its meandering streams.

It used to be a lot worse, about seven years ago, says local Ruth Law. “I was going for runs and the place was carpeted in litter.”

There wasn’t a lot of litter picking happening around 2017 and 2018, she says. “So I started going out every Saturday or Sunday for a couple of hours.”

Law joined up with a few other locals from the Castlecurragh Residents Association who regularly did clean-ups, she says. “We didn’t mind doing it. We all take pride in it.”

But Law and her neighbours are frustrated by how dependent the removal of rubbish from the park has become on volunteers, she says.

“There has never been a lot of input from Fingal County Council here,” she says. “There were no bins around the park until about a year ago.”

And now the volunteers are losing steam. Law is going to be moving away from the area, and the work is proving too much for the others, she says. “It’s stressful, and we can’t really enlist other people onto the rota, so it’s no longer sustainable.”

So Law and local councillors are looking for a greater council presence on the ground. Ideally, they are hoping that a warden could look after the Tolka Valley Park, she says.

“It would make the place a bit safer, because there are areas with anti-social activity, and I suppose people aren’t going to hang around if there is someone in a uniform there the whole time,” she says.

Fingal County Council uses one mobile ranger to oversee the majority of its parks in the Dublin 15 area, executive parks and landscape officer Oliver Hoey told a recent meeting of the Blanchardstown-Mulhuddart/Castleknock/Ongar Area Committee.

The council is looking to recruit more park rangers at the moment, he said. But he could not specify how many, or whether there would be one dedicated specifically to the Tolka Valley Park.

Improving oversight

The Tolka Valley Regional Park is almost 300 acres, according to Fingal County Council’s website.

It’s not a typical park, local Labour Councillor Mary McCamley told the area committee on 28 March.

It’s an area with great biodiversity, said Solidarity Councillor John Burtchaell. “I walk there regularly. I’ve spotted otters there recently, a family of otters up by Mulhuddart.”

Without the volunteers, the park would be in a dreadful state, he said. “They need help from the council. It should be supplied in some shape or form.”

The volunteers had agreed with the council to empty a pair of bins in the Tolka Valley on a regular basis, with the council collecting the bags daily, McCamley told the committee.

But the volunteers had come to McCamley, asking for a warden to oversee the area, she said. “Because they were fed up cleaning the bins.”

McCamley read a letter from Law to the committee, in which Law said it was fair that volunteers clean their estates.

“But the more we do, the more is asked of us,” Law wrote. “I think we should draw the line at emptying Fingal County Council bins.”

As a solution, McCamley tabled a motion asking for a dedicated park warden who could oversee Fingal’s part of Tolka Valley Park – which stretches south-east into the Dublin City Council area in Finglas/Glasnevin.

At the moment, the only park in Dublin 15 with a dedicated ranger is St Catherine’s Park in Lucan, wrote Hoey, the executive parks and landscape officer, in a report responding to McCamley’s motion.

“Current resources are not sufficient to dedicate a ranger to Tolka Valley Park,” he wrote.

Even “half a warden” would be enough, said McCamley, the Labour councillor. “Really, we do need some help and just to keep it tidy and clean, and make sure things are running smoothly there.”

A more structured approach

The council needs to work out a more organised approach to the park, Hoey told the area committee.

In recent years, the council has moved away from a static park warden model to a mobile ranger service, Hoey said.

“The reason we moved away from it was to make our resources more mobile and more flexible to be able to react to various things that happen around the council,” he said.

The mobile ranger service in Fingal carries out a number of duties, including opening and closing regional parks, their playgrounds, and toilets, a council spokesperson said on Tuesday evening.

“The mobile ranger will cover a number of parks and open spaces on a specific route each day,” the spokesperson said.

Included in their roles is emptying parks bins, as well as the logging and reporting of graffiti, vandalism and anti-social behaviour, the spokesperson says.

Litter picking however, was not listed among these duties.

The council has done bin pick-ups in the past, Hoey said on Thursday. “We need to revisit that and put more of a structure to it.”

Hoey said the management of the park will also be looked at as the council prepares its Open Space Strategy, which is due to be drafted in 2025. “It will be management of amenity grasslands within the county as a whole.”

The council is looking for more park rangers at the moment, he said. “And we will get them.”

But, currently the ability to recruit new workers is being held up, said Fingal senior executive officer Vanessa Carey. “I’m down a number of staff, which haven’t been replaced.”

“We really are under pressure,” Carey told the area committee. “And I have a serious number of vacancies. I can’t give a commitment here today that I could put a ranger in there because I don’t have that body.”

But, she said, the council shouldn’t be relying on volunteers to be emptying bins.