Dumping still an issue around Enniscorthy
WHILE three months ago, Wexford County Council declared that it was launching a new ‘ hitech’ war on litter, unfortunately people across the Enniscorthy area don’t appear to be reaping too many benefits of it just yet.
With some regularity, images are circulated online of piles of black bags, furniture, clothes and household waste piled on the side of local roads in what has become a tremendous blight on what would otherwise be beautiful countryside.
Although there are a number of clothes banks scattered around the district, the latest incident saw a collection of clothes callously disgarded at the side of the road at Knockmarshal, near Enniscorthy Golf Club.
Apart from attracting the disgust of locals, incidents like this also put out a terrible message to people perhaps visiting the area for a round of golf.
Always outspoken on the topic of illegal dumping and a keen advocate for harsher penalties for those responsible, Cllr John O’Rourke says that things don’t seem to have progressed at all.
‘Realistically, it’s great the government issued funding for cameras and drones etc, but it’s not working. It’s not being rolled out quick enough,’ he said.
‘At the moment, we seem to be having better luck with people putting up pictures of dumping in their area on social media. That seems to be helping more. People are being more vigilant.’
In relation to the latest incident with clothing being scattered all over the roadside, Cllr O’Rourke has a theory of his own.
‘What’s going on is people are leaving out bags of clothes to be collected by charity groups,’ he said. ‘ Then these individuals come along and take the bags; they go through them for things they can sell at car boot sales and that kind of thing and then dump what they don’t want. I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before. I’m fully convinced that that’s why things are disappearning from graves at the graveyard too. It’s people with no shame taking things to sell at car boot sales and the like. It happens on a regular basis.’
Cllr O’Rourke urged members of the public who see people fly-tipping in their local areas to take down their registration plates and report them.