Mullingar to improve litter status

Mullingar will be hoping to improve on previous results in this year’s round of the Irish Business Against Litter (IBAL ) anti-litter league. IBAL announced this week that Mullingar will once again be included in its annual Anti-Litter League, which is now in its 13th year. Mullingar was deemed ‘moderately littered’ in the most recent IBAL report in January, and at 38th place was almost at the bottom of the list of the 42 towns surveyed. Over 80 per cent of towns were deemed to be ‘Clean to European norms’. Furthermore, for 2014, IBAL is expanding the inspections to include important link roads between towns, such as Mullingar-Navan. “Visitors’ impression of a town are clearly influenced by the environment they pass as they make their way to it,” says spokesperson for IBAL Conor Horgan. “Also, in the case of many business visitors they may not even enter a town, but stay in a hotel on the outskirts and do their business in an industrial park outside the town’s limits. For these reasons there is a need to extend our work beyond the strict boundaries of any given town.” According to IBAL, the abolition of town councils, including Mullingar Town Council, could undo some of the progress made by the anti-litter league in recent years. “Town councils have been at the heart of the improvements to the cleanliness levels of towns, with cleaning procedures tailored to local needs and swift response when the need arises,” says Mr Horgan. “It’s worth remembering that just a few short years ago the majority of our towns were heavily littered and we don’t want to return to that.”