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Just
before last year’s assembly elections I travelled
by bus to Downpatrick. Had I been a blindfolded game
quiz contestant I would have been unfortunate to be
penalised for describing the vehicle I was on as a
refuse truck. It was literally bogging. Bottles, papers,
crisp packets, sweet wrappers, chewing gum, black
gooey stuff that lined the rim of the seats and stuck
to the trousers – many of the same seats were
also ripped. How the driver avoided wearing a SARS
type protective mask was testimony to his sense of
stoicism. Perhaps he had been to the doctor and found
out he had only a week to live, and the state of the
vehicle didn’t matter any more. But what then
was he doing driving our bus? I suppose he thought
the smell would kill us first before we realised that
it was more painless than expiring as a result of
him passing away at the wheel. But the least Ulster
Bus could have done was issue a public health warning
along with the ticket. Roll on 2016 and then it will
be Ireland Bus and we will all live in a hygienic
heaven ever after. The squalor that Belfast people
meet going about their daily lives will be sent packing
along with the Brits.
But
there is just one problem; the interior of the bus
didn’t look vastly different from the streets
that we inhabit in the fiefdom of West Belfast, where
those who are elected to represent us make promises
about 2016. The streets in this constituency too,
quite often, are filth strewn. And I don’t mean
with drunken politicians pissing into our gardens,
and claiming to be only watering the plants when an
irate householder tells them to clear off. Is there
nothing the truth-shy plonkers can’t spin? Our
pavements and roads are littered with what should
rightly belong to the city dump at Duncrue Street.
Parents, if accompanied by toddlers, scan every step
of their journey on foot, navigating a path for their
child through the batches of broken glass and what
the dogs have dropped. A couple of years ago a letter
writer in the Irish News compared the litter strewn
Whiterock Road to a crash scene from a Boeing 747.
Gross hyperbole - but passable as a touch of writer’s
license to underscore the point. 31 years ago I was
in Glasgow during a refuge strike – yet the streets
of that city looked cleaner than our own.
A
while back my wife sent for a councillor to complain
– a member of the SDLP. Our local Sinn Fein councillor
was away commemorating British war dead or something
- as they do these days - on the gleaming brush swept
pavements of Belfast City Hall. I would have sent
for none of them – what difference does it make?
Although in Sinn Fein’s defence, they do come
equipped, but it is hard to sweep a street with a
baseball bat. Kids standing at corners are higher
up the priority chart of our socially conscious elite;
better that the street be cleared of the vibrancy
of our young citizens than the suffocating stench
of inanimate rubbish.
The
bins were lifted this morning. Sometimes it looks
as if the lorry carting our rubbish away has a hole
in the bottom of it, which leaves a trail of garbage
along its collection route. The bin men didn’t
appear over the festive season, they had got their
tips, took some time out and went on the rip. Couldn’t
blame them, but the council failed to provide adequate
back-up. Who wants to work the holiday period just
so some better paid bureaucrat can keep her books
right? Complaints were plentiful as residents strove
to keep their own little patch tidy in the face of
mounting heaps of black bag smothered bins. Apart
from election campaigns Christmas is the busiest time
of the year for rubbish.
But
our dirty streets predate Christmas. Ten years ago
a former republican prisoner told me that he worked
painting houses in Belvoir. It was always clean, he
mused, not like our areas which he likened to a rubbish
tip. He blamed the council - it was anti-Catholic.
Apart from thinking that he was crazy or desperately
in need of money - a republican working in Belvoir
- I marvelled at his powers of observation. Watching
over the shoulder would have seemed a more prudent
exercise than comparing the hygiene of Belvoir with
that of Turf Lodge. But given nationalist representation
in the City Hall today it is hard to imagine that
the council can deliberately discriminate against
nationalist areas – a ‘let them wallow in
their own muck’ approach. More plausible is that
the politicians these communities put in are too wrapped
up in British pomp, ceremony and imperialist graves
to be concerned with community hygiene. Some of the
councillors must say 'if the community vote a crook
like me into office, then they deserve the council
they get.'
And
it is not as if it is beyond even Belfast City Council's
limited aptitude and imagination. The type of military
precision that goes into campaigns to get many of
them elected could easily be applied to approaching
the problem that literally plagues our streets. New
York, for example, the morning after its New Year
party, shows little sign that only hours earlier it
had been the site of major revellery; the twenty six
ton of rubbish deposited on the city streets lifted
by only 100 workers.
But
perhaps there is a secret plan at work here, part
of the wider scheme to unite the country by 2016.
In mid-December, Bray, just outside Dublin, was accorded
the status of ‘the dirtiest town in the Republic’
- the result of a litter league table produced by
an alliance of Irish businesses - Irish Business Against
Litter (IBAL). Industrial pollution and factory waste
were hardly factored into its calculations, just the
waste of the poor. Nevertheless, as it is happening
in both parts of the island, it might be evidence
of the harmonisation of waste accumulation as a forerunner
to establishing cross border bin men.
‘Rubbish’
is the only response that springs to mind.
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