Tidy Towns group fury at brazen illegal dumping

From this week’s Galway City Tribune – When Denis Dwyer stumbled upon four old mattresses strewn in a ditch on one of Bearna’s back roads, the chairperson of the local Tidy Towns committee’s initial reaction was visceral.

“Scumbags,” he called them in a post on the Facebook page of Bailte Slachtmara Bhearna.

“I was raging – four mattresses dumped in a heap? Raging,” he said this week, still angry at the brazenness of it.

And he’s good reason to be cross. In March 2020, Mr Dwyer, a local taxi driver, spearheaded the re-establishment of the Tidy Towns committee, which hasn’t been active in the Gaeltacht village for years.

In just over 12 months, and despite the lockdown, the group has been successful in cleaning up Bearna, and encouraging community activism.

It has close-on 100 volunteers who pick litter and weed on a regular basis, and more than 150 people have volunteered their time and helped out the group in some capacity over the year.

This May, Bearna enters the Tidy Towns competition for the first time since 1998, and the committee is hopeful about how it will fare. But incidents such as those involving the mattresses can hamper efforts, and demoralise volunteers.

Mr Dwyer said that illegal dumping in the bushes along the road from Corbally to Paddy’s Cross was particularly bad. And the suspicion is fly-tippers are coming from Galway City and using Bearna as their dump.

A similar problem persisted in rural areas of Menlo, which was particularly blighted by illegal dumping in recent years. According to Mayor of Galway, Mike Cubbard, the problem is now rampant everywhere, and not just rural areas on the city’s outskirts.
This is a shortened preview version of this article. To read the rest of the story on illegal dumping around the city, see this week’s Galway City Tribune. You can buy a digital edition HERE.