Martin Hart

Good morning, Clare.

How are you?

Yeah, look, I mean, I suppose you have to look at the data.

Firstly, the Irish businesses against litter, their surveys, which they survey the city centre and they measure the level of cleanliness each year.

And they show a measurable improvement in the cleanliness grades in the city centre since the bin bag restriction came in place.

So the bin bag restriction came in place in Temple Bar last year.

Before that, it was a mess.

And going back 10 or 15 or 20 years, it was a huge mess.

Look,

So that's, I suppose, that's not a theory, it's a fact.

So bans remove litter from streets.

I suppose you have to look at the structural thing.

Bin bags are structurally unfit to have waste in.

They burst, they leak, they attract rats and seagulls, they tear them apart.

And the result is litter spread across the street.

And look, that's not just a Dublin problem.

If you look in Edinburgh, they've been battling this for years between foxes and dogs.

And actually in Paris before the Olympics, this was one of the biggest things they had to deal with before the 2024 Olympics.

And it was the actual scale of these huge amounts of bin bags put out in the street.

And they invested in underground and semi-underground containers and so on.