Massive Cleanup Challenge in Tallaght - giving the Whitestown Stream back to nature

July 2021: Many of you will have seen the pictures that we have put on our Facebook and Twitter pages about the rubbish swamp that we discovered in Whitestown Stream in Killinarden, Tallaght.. Rubbish which would normally have been washed downriver collected behind a fallen tree and created a 1 metre high dam.

We will be working on clearing this over the next two months to give this space back to nature and wildlife. Having to date removed around 100 bags of rubbish, we estimate there is another 100 bags to be collected there, as well as the usual traffic cones, bikes etc. The rubbish is almost exclusively household waste and is consistent with the ‘bottle swamp’ that we found further upriver in 2019.

While we appreciate that a lot of people have offered to help us, the issue is that to get upriver we need waders, and we are currently working with a group of people who we know and are confident with in the water. There will be a day in the future where we will need strong hands to move the bags from the banks of the river to the roadside for collection, so save your strength till then.

Why people dump rubbish in the river and how it can be prevented is another discussion. There is the initial issue of how waste is managed in Dublin and the country in general, there’s an educational issue as well and there’s a lack of facilities and litter policing in the form of litter wardens from the council. SDCC currently has five litter wardens for 275,000 people and it simply isn’t enough. There are a number of initiatives that the council could take on littering, we’d be more than happy to sit down and discuss them if they want to reach out to us.

We have picked thousands of cans and bottles out of this stretch. If each one had a 25 cent deposit on it then this number would be greatly reduced. Reverse vending does work, we hope that on a government level this will be introduced without delay.

The sad thing is that this stretch of the river is incredibly beautiful if you ignore the rubbish. It’s essentially inaccessible to people because of the growth around it and as a result, nature has been allowed to flourish without any outside interference. This past week with temperatures hitting 28 degrees in the shade, that section of the river feels so much cooler than the surrounding area and it’s a relief to be in there. It shows us the importance of trees in the city and how important it is to protect and maintain them.

A further threat to this section of the river is on the horizon in the shape of a proposed greenway that is initially planned to pass through here. While we in Dodder Action support sustainable transport, we urge that SDCC look at alternatives such as running the greenway along the Whitestown Road which runs parallel to the river. Our previous experience is that there is too much destruction of natural surroundings when greenways are being built and that there is a lack of full consultation during this process.

We’ll keep ye posted on our progress over the next few weeks, it’s a big project, probably the biggest single clean up we’ve ever attempted, but we’ll get there in the end.