[Guest Post] Beneath the Surface

For my second guest post The Dublin Diary will be straying far from it's normal lighthearted topics to something much more heavy and thought provoking. Gary Gannon is community activist in the North Inner City. I've been lucky enough to work with him and draw on his advice for the last year. When I spoke to Gary about doing a guest post for my blog he suggested he write about litter and I was delighted, it's a subject dear to my heart. I'm often dismayed by the sheer amounts of rubbish I see around the capital. I have to be honest though Gary's piece below made me think twice about the presence of rubbish and the people who have caused it. If you would like to hear more of Gary's musings you can follow him on Twitter. 
It seems to be quite in vogue at the moment for people in the North Inner City of Dublin to spend much of their time taking pictures of rubbish on the street and to consequently spend hours upon end discussing the aesthetic demerits of these waste piles on various blogs, social networking sites and even in the national press. I write this not to pass judgment on such behaviour, in fact it’s not even the first time that I have witnessed this phenomenon.
You see, last year myself and the girlfriend visited London and while there we did all the usual things people do while in London; we saw Buckingham Palace, went to the West End and visited loads of Museums. It was in one of these museums, the Tate Modern I believe it was- that I witnessed an exhibition not too dissimilar at all to one I witness every morning on my way to work or as I visit my family home in Dublin’s North Inner City. It was Rubbish. No really, this exhibition actually consisted of a video of litter blowing around a London street and here, in the Tate Modern as in Central Dublin over the past couple of months people gathered around willfully prepared to assess it in great depth.
I am not very artsy at the best of times but I had just left the National Gallery of London where I consider the real art to hang out and I wasn't prepared to interpret this pile of garbage for anything other than simply that. So I took the only recourse to action I had at my disposal and made a few snide comments before resolving to move on but at that very moment I was reprimanded for my apparent ignorance and not even by my girlfriend (my usual source of reprimand) but by a stranger to my left who was so absorbed in the piece that one could have mistaken her for a fixture of the museum in her own right.
This lady informed me that if I ‘only looked at the rubbish for what it was rather than what it represented then I obviously wasn't going to understand the intention of the artist’. An uneasy silence ensued from which I made a comment I thought to be witty but my girlfriend ensures me simply intensified the awkwardness of the situation before moving on to the next piece of “art” in full hope that I would quickly forget the experience. However, it has been well over a year now and once again I find myself assessing the meaning of rubbish with the words of that stern appreciator of modern art reverberating in my head.
Not wishing to deny the reality of the situation I will accept fully that my community of North Inner City Dublin has a problem with the amount of litter we find dumped illegally on our streets. To put it quite frankly the prevalence of dumped rubbish on our streets is an eyesore that is unbecoming of our proud traditions and renowned spirit of community. That said however, it would be incredibly foolish of us to believe that the visibility of rubbish on the street is an unsightly blemish on what otherwise would be a pristine face because that simply isn’t the case and such analysis will not lead to solutions upon this issue. The area’s most associated with the illegal dumping such as the ones which appear on the Dublin Litter Blog or in the video carried by thejournal.ie a while back are also the places where we find some of the highest levels of social exclusion and deprivation in the country.
Throughout this debate I have yet to hear one commentator ask or indeed highlight what conditions are like for the people who have to live inside these properties adjacent to the piles of illegally dumped rubbish. Thus far, all this debate has proven is that we concern ourselves only with the visibility of social deprivation when it infringes upon our own living standards. I walk down the North Circular Road every morning on my way to work and I cannot see how we expect families to live in what essentially equate to conditions no different to the tenement blocks of old. On the window of one of these private landlord flats there is a large cry for help in the form of white sign that reads; “This flat has no shower, no toilet, no wash basin.” The video in thejournal.ie column documented a pile of rubbish lying against a large tree facing this very same building but unfortunately for the creator of this sign the camera never turned around to highlight his plea.

In attempting to deal with the problem of illegal dumping, Dublin City Council has set up a North Inner City Action Group which has failed to provide any real creativity or leadership on the issue. Proposals from the action group so far, such as proposing untagged rubbish bags go uncollected for up to a week on end have served only to infuriate local residents who feel they are being collectively punished for the actions of an extreme minority. The Action Group could start to show real leadership by acknowledging that privatisation of waste disposal services has been an unmitigated disaster and make strides to reclaim what should never have being anything but a public service in the first place. Providing more bins might also be a solution too, it’s a fact not lost on the people of the North Inner City that because they are prohibited from having wheelie bins that the cost of their waste collections is significantly higher than their suburban counterparts. Added to this, the absence of a wheelie bin coupled with absolutely zero waste storage facilities create a very practical problem of where exactly do you expect residents of already cramped accommodations to store their waste? It should also be highlighted that for every story of a resident willing to simply dump illegally under the cover of darkness there is an equal tale of lawfully tagged refuge going uncollected because of some minor discrepancy such as exceeding a weight limit or having being damaged by the rummaging of a stray cat for example.
But I simply cannot get that visit to the Tate Modern out of my head however and in particular the reprimand I received for seeing rubbish merely as rubbish. I really don’t want to make the same mistake twice so perhaps in the litter problem of the North Inner City there is something far more substantial going on than simple aesthetic indifference. Can the rubbish I along with many others spend far too long analysing lead us to ask difficult questions of ourselves such as: ‘Is it realistic of us to expect people who have being totally excluded from the system in terms of employment, education or appropriate housing conditions to engage with the system only when it suits us by purchasing bin tags etc?’ Or rather, do these same vulnerable people care that the headquarters of The Gathering or even the IFSC are but a ten minute walk away when really we are expecting them to store their rubbish bins in their kitchens so our visitors will not have to see it. Or maybe in the rubbish on the streets of the North Inner City we can witness the first shoots of civil disobedience that we have so long being expecting in this country in a manner not entirely dissimilar to what the people of Brazil are demonstrating happens when those in power try to put a lick of paint over social deprivation. Who Knows, maybe once again I am simply misunderstanding the intention of the artist when it comes to rubbish.