Why has Fingal County Council issued so few fines for littering so far this year?

Why has the number of fines issued by wardens for littering been declining over the years? asked Labour Party Councillor John Walsh, at a recent meeting. 

Back in 2017, the council issued 1,001 fines for littering. By 2022, that number had dropped to 443. Last year, to 265.

This year, there were (58 ) fines between January and April, and none in May, according to council data online, marked as updated 10 June. By email, a council spokesperson gave a higher number (84) for January to May. 

Castleknock Tidy Towns member Declan Mescall said low numbers track with his experience. “We thought they're very inactive.”

The council’s now working on a new litter-management plan, and the volunteer group submitted a letter as part of that process. That plan says that in 2023, the council issued €35,000 in fines and penalties for littering.  

Castleknock Tidy Towns wrote that, “We consider the amount of €35,000 in fines imposed seems astonishingly low.” 

Aidan Browne of Blanchardstown Village TidyTowns said he hasn’t had contact with the local litter warden. 

At the 5 June meeting of the Blanchardstown area committee, Walsh, the Labour councillor, raised the declining levels of fines by the litter wardens, asking “what the explanation for that is”. 

Catherine O’Donovan, a senior executive officer at the council, who was giving a presentation on the draft of the new litter management plan for 2025 to 2027, did not answer that question directly.

In response to a query about the low number of fines, a council spokesperson said by email Monday that, “In order to issue a fine under the Litter Pollution Act, evidence of a breach in legislation must be obtained. This can be evidence obtained by the Litter Wardens themselves or via a completed Witness Statement.”

Hiring more wardens

At the 5 June meeting, O’Donovan did talk about the council’s plans to increase the number of litter wardens it employs, and recent trends. 

“We had six, the number went down to four, with promotions and retirements. We're proposing to go to eight, so we have approval for four more,” O’Donovan said. 

With more staff, the council would move to doing litter enforcement seven days a week, the draft litter management plan says. 

But hiring more litter wardens is likely to be a challenge, said Fine Gael Councillor Ted Leddy, at the 5 June committee meeting.  

“All of this is predicated on something that's a lot easier said than done, and that's recruiting more litter wardens,” Leddy said. 

“Recruitment is very difficult at the minute,” he said. “How do you expect to deal with the obvious difficulty?”

He didn’t get a clear answer at the meeting. 

Still, at the meeting, Socialist Party Councillor John Burtchaell was one of the councillors who said they welcomed the plan to hire more litter wardens.

“I think there's been too much of a focus on volunteerism over the past number of years,” he said. 

“There's many TidyTown groups and clean up groups doing, you know, a massive amount of work keeping their areas clean,” he said. 

“But you know, that needs to be reinforced by, you know, council resources, full-time litter wardens,” he said.

Beyond enforcement

The draft litter management plan has four pillars: litter prevention, community engagement, cleanup, and enforcement.

Litter prevention includes having enough bins around, having litter wardens out and about, putting up CCTV to catch illegal dumpers, that kind of thing. 

Community engagement involves raising awareness, running educational campaigns in the community and online – convincing people not to litter, basically. 

Cleanup by the council’s operations department, and enforcement using litter wardens and CCTV are the final two pillars. 

“Everybody's involved in protecting Fingal and dealing with the litter issue. Our communities are Tidy Towns, yourselves, the council ourselves,” O’Donovan said at the meeting.

Struggling Tidy Towns

Tidy Towns groups might be factored into the council’s plan to keep the county clean, but Browne, of Blanchardstown Village Tidy Towns, says his group is barely keeping its head above water.

“People seem to assume that there are loads of volunteers,” he said. “And there aren’t.”

Most of the work falls on a small core group, he said. “We have 200 people on our WhatsApp group but that doesn’t translate into activity.”

Browne said for the last two years, they were fortunate to have a refuge in the area for people seeking asylum in Ireland. That brought a massive amount of help, he said.

“Over 200 of those ladies volunteered with us over the last two years at different times,” Browne said. “And in the absence of that, if I took those out of the equation, we would have about a dozen people.”

But then the centre closed, and its residents moved elsewhere. Losing so many volunteers took a toll, Browne said.

“We were very close this year to actually throwing in the towel”, he said. 

Changes

Browne says education is more important than more wardens and tougher punishments. 

According to the draft litter management plan, the two biggest sources of litter in 2022 and 2023 were passing pedestrians, and passing motorists. 

“From our point of view locally, there needs to be a cultural attitude change to littering,” Browne said. “Saying to people, that's not okay, you know, don’t just throw your rubbish on the ground.”

Mescall, of Castleknock Tidy Towns, said he wanted to see more of an emphasis on sustainability in the new draft littering plan – an evolution his group recently took. 

“We recently rebranded ourselves as being a sustainability, environmental and climate action group,” he said. “We have all changed and adapted to make them the centre of our activity.”

In their submission on the draft plan, they wrote that it doesn’t do enough to link littering with broader environmental concerns.

“Recycling and composting bins need to be called out more in the plan,” they wrote. “A banana peel is highlighted as taking two years to biodegrade. However, there appears to be no specific mention of the brown bins in the draft plan.”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.