"One thing will not alter, though administrations come and go with the tides, and that is the litter problem of Ireland. It will not go because there is no political will for it to go - and it is quite clear that the Irish people of their own volition will not solve the litter problem without coercion and a modicum of education."
These words appeared in this space three years ago after Minister Howlin, bristling with bravado, and stroking his sturdy moustache with a positively gladiatoral determination, declared an increase in the fine for litterers. The announcement of the discovery of the one True Cross could not have been made with more gravitas than the government's declaration of its tough new measures against homo vandalus litteratus. The truth was, of course, that the new fines were in fact actually less in real terms than the ones they had replaced when the latter had originally been introduced. Which did not, of course, prevent Tom Kavanagh, of Irish Business Against Litter yodelling with joy at the Minister's initiative.
Forgotten
It wasn't, as we know, an initiative at all, just another piece of sleepwalking masquerading as policy, in which pieties with a subatomic life-expectancy are muttered on a platform and as quickly forgotten, with no new instruments of implementation introduced. And now, three years later, with the new laws just as unenforced as the old ones, and the litter problem measurably worse, IBAL and Tom Kavanagh have slunk back before the public, finally admitting defeat.
This time - in despair - they're promoting a campaign to apologise to foreigners in their own languages for the filthy state of our roads and countryside. Tom dolefully observes that appealing to people was not enough, and that the only way to deal with it was by rigorous enforcement, as illegal car-parking had been dealt with. And, might I add, as in the coercion proposed here three years ago?
Dearly though I would love to clamp litter-leavers to the roadside until a hefty fine is paid, or have a litter-pound to which offenders are towed and kept overnight - preferably in one of those dumps with which the authorities have so thoughtfully ringed Dublin - I somehow suspect there might be constitutional objections to such courses of action: which merely confirms what a flawed document the Constitution actually is.
But what point is there in talking of coercion when there is no-one to do the coercing? Has anyone ever seen a garda arrest someone who throws a piece of litter on the ground? Has anyone ever heard of a court levying any sort of coercive fine at all on a convicted litterer? The maximum fine of £1,500 (in real terms a reduction of 15 per cent on the 1982 fine of £800) might exist in the statute books; but it is merely a theoretical number, as useless as the 150th decimal point in the value of pi. It was never intended to be imposed, because no machinery was created to impose it. It is a legislative sanctimony, no more.
Taboo
We all know that one clear start would be for teachers to create a taboo amongst children against littering. Since it is March, and the summer holidays will be upon us in a matter of a few days, with another six months or so before a bronzed teaching profession returns from the beaches, it is clearly no project for the short-term. But was it beyond the wit and wisdom of every single minister for education for the past 20 years to have put public cleanliness on the national curriculum?
Well, yes, apparently it was. No matter. At least we might turn the situation to our advantage.
We already have far too many tourists anyway. Bord Failte should be closed down and replaced by An Bord Saig Oiff, which will circulate to the capitals of the world the apologetic notices raised by IBAL, with additional warnings that all would-be tourist-charter aeroplanes will be repulsed by anti-aircraft fire from our splendid Army. We should declare ourselves the litter capital of the world, abandoning literary prizes for litter ones. Too many damned writers anyway - scribble, scribble, scribble and be damned.
Exhibition
So we should have prizes for litterary art: the most festooned street, the most violated field, the most desecrated park, will be acclaimed by the Museum of Modern Art, which might then manage to have a ground-breaking, cutting-edge exhibition on litter as an expression of popular subliminal culture. If New York can turn graffiti into art, can't Dublin do something similar for litter? O'Connell Street at dawn - burger-wrappings, vomit and passed-out junkies: l'Irlande aujourd'hui.
We have the highest rate of illiteracy in western Europe anyway: is it not an absurd falsehood at the same time to be producing so much literature? Is not litter - with its kindred-spirits, the chipvan brawl, the abandoned mattress in the ditch, and the rusting car in the field - a truer measure of the civic values inculcated in our small-town and city-estate schools right across the country?
If there is one sign of what we really are, rather than the vainglorious, strutting creature we see in our hall of economically successful but distorting mirrors, it is our litter-bedecked streets. Litter speaks the truth about us. At the very least, it should teach us modesty. We should be grateful for it.