let's face it, we really are a filthy people. Because we have no concept of the public realm, we treat any common property - streets and squares, parks and forests, beaches and promenades, and even the pilgrim path up Croagh Patrick - as an open litter bin.
Look at Henry Street and Mary Street in Dublin; as soon as their stylish repaving had been completed, at a cost of £1.5 million, there was chewing gum residue on nearly every slab of granite. And on the very day it opened, somebody got sick on the millennium footbridge.
Walk down Grafton Street any evening and see the huge piles of packaging "waste" deposited on the street for collection. In many other European countries, notably Denmark and Germany, most of this type of "waste" would be recovered or recycled.
Temple Lane, where I live, has been turned into Dumpsterville, with at least a dozen large bins parked on the footpaths, forcing pedestrians to walk on the cobbled street. These large wheelie-bins are simply waste magnets, particularly for restaurants dumping food.
Sunflower Recycling used to do a collection in Temple Bar but gave it up as a bad job because it was taking away just 12 bags a week, a tiny fraction of the amount of "waste" being generated in the area by residents and business premises.
Now, it costs us £2 per bag to have Sunflower collect our recyclables, whereas if we put it out on the street as rubbish it would be taken away free by Dublin Corporation. In those circumstances, a bizarre reversal of the polluter pays principle, it's no wonder so few give a hoot.
The State's new-found prosperity has aggravated the problem by introducing a large element of conspicuous consumption which, inevitably, produces even larger volumes of rubbish requiring disposal. The proportion we recycle is the lowest in northern Europe.
Kerbside, Dublin's only door-to-door recycling collection, is being wound up, partly because of chronic underfunding. Yet the waste management strategy for the capital recommended that 80 per cent of its households should be served by such a scheme.
Nobody cares about the mountain of waste we're creating, or the fact that it's increasing year by year, as long as it's carted off and dumped somewhere else. Indeed, many people only discover "the environment" as a cause when the problem comes home to haunt them.
The location of new waste disposal facilities of any kind provokes hysterical opposition. The old NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome has been replaced by BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) and NOTE (Not Over There Either).
Even where waste disposal facilities are run in an exemplary manner - such as South Dublin County Council's highly-engineered landfill site in a disused quarry near Kill, Co Kildare - local people just don't want to know. They would prefer to live with their neat prejudices.
Mr P.J. Rudden, the Republic's leading expert on waste management - whose firm, M.C. O'Sullivan, consulting engineers, has produced many of the regional waste strategies - has been roasted at several public meetings. He says there are signs of change around the country but it's very slow.
"We have to get out there and sell the benefits of an integrated approach to waste management if we are to deal successfully with a lot of misinformation doing the rounds," he says.
Two years have passed since a waste management strategy for the greater Dublin area was unveiled. It aimed to reduce waste going to landfill to just 15 per cent by switching the emphasis to recycling and minimisation, with the residue going for thermal treatment.
A site has now been identified for an incinerator on the Poolbeg peninsula in Dublin Bay, near the corporation's sewage treatment plant, now being upgraded at a cost of £200 million. Yet even though nobody lives within 1 km of the place, local opposition is intense.
People in Ringsend, Irishtown and Sandymount won't have anything to do with it, other than waging a relentless campaign against it. They are not remotely persuaded by the fact that Copenhagen's Amager incinerator is much closer to residential areas, with no ill-effects.
It is clearly nonsensical that local authorities must continually find new holes in the ground to fill with our waste; at least with incineration its energy value is being recovered. And Poolbeg is probably the best site in Dublin for a municipal waste incinerator.
The heat it generates could be turned into electricity, in conjunction with the nearby ESB power station, or used to run the sewage treatment plant. If we were any good at planning, it might also have fuelled a district heating scheme for the entire Docklands area.
It is an integral part of the waste strategy that 60 per cent of the total volume of waste must be recycled, with only the residue being burned.
For this to work, waste charges must be introduced in line with the polluter pays principle.
Given that each of us is now producing half-a-tonne of waste per annum, the imposition of charges is essential. Yet in the greater Dublin area, only Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has had the guts to do this, at a rate of £150 per household per annum.
Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown also intends to move quickly to replace this flat fee with a weight-related charge, thus ensuring that the more wasteful households pay more than those which make some effort to reduce or recycle the "waste" they produce.
The fact that the £150 charge is being introduced without too much fuss would appear to indicate that public attitudes are changing. Yet in Greystones, Co Wicklow, it took 18 months to agree on the location of new bottle banks anywhere near where people live.
Repak, the not-for-profit company set up by IBEC three years ago, is dismissed by some as an "umbrella for avoidance" by industry of its duty to recycle packaging waste. But it will have a budget of £12 million this year, funded by hefty levies on member companies.
Much of this money will probably go to funding new Kerbside-type schemes in Dublin and elsewhere, as well as the company's Greet Dot campaign. Certainly, without a significant commitment to recycling, there will be no public support for incinerators.
As for those who believe that younger people are more environmentally conscious, Bord Failte would say that the most litter-strewn stretch of road in any Irish town is between the school and the tuck shop.
Sadly, we seem to be raising another generation of litter bugs.