We're all likely to be caught short over the next few months, dying to spend a penny as we're encouraged to do a lot of our living outdoors. Ireland's local authorities have rarely been good at providing public toilets, and their scarcity is all the more apparent right now.
Enter pee.ie, a list – nay, a sprinkling – of public toilets throughout the island of Ireland. The site has created its map with the help of the peeing public, as intrepid toilet users update it with loo locations, clicking on the site to upload new ones. This much-needed public service has been brought to us by someone fed up with bursting for the jacks.
Tom Wainwright says pee.ie grew out of his own frustration, and of lockdown. He lives in Dublin city centre and has seen the outcome of our lack of public toilets first-hand. He looked for a map of toilet locations, found none and decided to do it himself.
The site wasn’t heavily used during lockdown, of course, but over the past couple of months “it’s blown up”, he says, with more people using it, and submitting locations, each week. Sharing our toilet experiences makes more useful information for all: “The more people that use it, the better it gets.”
Pee.ie has steadily built a following, now receiving up to 1,000 visits a day, along with 10 or 15 new toilet locations (although some are duplicates – Wainwright vets them before adding). The map now has almost 700 loos; it’s at proof-of-concept stage and starting to include more details, such as directions, cleanliness and charges.
Some toilets on the map are public facilities; others are in shops, garages or public attractions. The site encourages toilet users to support them with custom. He’s had only a couple of places contact him unhappy at inclusion. (Wainwright’s day job is in marketing and this is just a hobby – “I don’t want to be the toilet guy!” he says.)
Wainwright’s aim was first to create a resource for finding toilets across the country, and then to highlight where they’re lacking. He is able to single out a couple of memorable facilities off the top of his head, mentioning the public toilets in Cahir, Co Tipperary – “they look like they’ve landed from outer space” – and a tiny loo “like a box at the end of the harbour” near Fahamore Point in Co Kerry. Possibly proving there is no more sincere form of flattery, Dublin City Council has now created a similar map.
Pee.ie is a resource, but it also starts a conversation about the dearth of loos. “Using a toilet when you’re out and about is not a choice but a right. Councils should be providing them,” says Wainwright. Initiatives like this might shame them into doing so.
