Sheehy Skeffington Meadows social housing estate included
Against litter group accused of having a ‘lack of empathy’
The Irish Businesses Against Litter (IBAL) group have been criticised for having a “complete lack of empathy”, after they said they would not exclude social housing communities from the areas they monitor.
The 2025 IBAL report was met with much disapproval in Tallaght in June after it transpired the group had included two residential estates, Sheehy Skeffington Meadows and Aidan’s Close in the areas it looked at.
In the first round of the IBAL report 2025, released in June, Tallaght ranked 38th out of 40 towns and cities surveyed and was deemed “littered”, a significant drop of 10 places from the previous year.
Tallaght Community Council released a statement at the time saying that “something seems amiss” with IBAL’s approach to the survey and questioning why residential areas like Sheehy Skeffington Meadows and Aidan’s Close had been included.
A motion was agreed by councillors at the full SDCC council meeting on Monday, October 13, to send a letter to IBAL calling on them “and their agent, An Taisce, to refrain from including small social housing areas in their annual report, when considering the overall littering report on the general area and should only consider commercial and open public realm areas in their report”.
South Dublin County Council agreed to send the letter, adding that the council executive had met with IBAL in July to discuss the survey and to share “their concerns with the recent survey results”.
In the response from IBAL, shared with councillors at the November council meeting, the organisation said they believe “that excluding any location-type risks undermining the integrity of our surveys”.
“To provide as representative a picture as possible of litter levels in a town or city, An Taisce’s monitoring is carried out across a range of public, commercial and residential location types.”
“The case for excluding small social housing in particular is unclear to us and we would be interested to learn of the council’s reasons for proposing same,” they stated.
Cllr Mick Duff (Ind), who submitted the motion to write the letter in October, said the reply from IBAL “demonstrates a complete lack of empathy with communities”.
“It takes time to build a community, and in some smaller social housing areas, day-to-day living takes precedence over setting up Residents Associations or indeed, Tidy Town Groups,” Cllr Duff told The Echo.
“If IBAL does not understand why I put down my motion or why council management supported it, then I invite them to come to a council meeting and we will engage in a debate as to why it is not appropriate to select small social areas in areas of high deprivation to highlight issues and ignore an area such as Tallaght village and fail to give it a mention in its report on Tallaght,” he added.
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