Last month's Canadian Vindicator e-zine linking Ireland and Canada carried an item on Dublin, the Irish capital, headed "When it comes to litter, we're number one!" It stemmed from the findings of study commissioned by IBAL, Irish Business Against Litter.

The item has drawn the following response from a constant reader whose ire was aroused and whose pride in Dublin was offended.

"I want to pick you up on the subject of my greatly loved "dirty Dublin" and the subject of litter. I know that figures can't lie, but liars can figure, and the picture you paint does not reflect the reality on the ground here.

I would challenge anyone to say that Dublin is a dirty city. OK, there are areas like the Liberties which have been historically amongst the dirtiest areas imaginable, but the city today is a credit to the City Fathers and the Corporation staff. It is a pleasure to walk from Leeson Street to Dorset Street and see flowers colour the neat pavements, and street lighting picking up the beauty of the architecture at night.

Even in places like Moore Street and the Markets area, adequate refuse collection keeps the smells and waste--with which I grew up--a distant memory.

The River Liffey through the city smells as sweet as when it flows past my garden fifteen miles upstream, and the Board Walk in the city centre provides a new and exciting location for the young and the old to stroll in a most continental manner.

One very simple decision by the government to put an exorbitant tax on plastic bags has been the most decisive factor in the cleaning of city streets and even more so of the countryside, where hedgerows, for years festooned with multicoloured plastic bags, are once again blooming in their pristine beauty.

Over the past year I have visited, London, Edinburgh, Birmingham, York, New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Washington, and it is my belief that "dear old dirty Dublin" is not alone cleaner but more beautiful than any or all of them."

The Vindicator is happy to publish this rebuttal, coming as it does from a former first lady of the capital. Civic pride is to be lauded. As an aid in encouraging ongoing measures to rid the streets of unsightly litter it can work wonders, vide the Tidy Towns contest which has been hailed as one of the most imaginative and worthwhile projects ever undertaken in support of Irish tourism.

Our correspondent does acknowledge that Dublin is an expensive city in which to live. Her e-mail concludes:

"The cost of living is, however, a nightmare. Our young increasingly have to remain under the parental roof as the cheapest apartment in the city can cost almost a quarter of a million euros to buy, and up to 1,200 euros a month to rent."

To think that once upon a time one could rent a flat at 99 St. Stephen's Green for £3 a week, the figures quoted are staggering!

A quick follow-up to the story on litter came in the middle of July when Ireland's Environment Minister Martin Cullen announced plans to place a special litter tax on chewing gum, polystyrene fast-food wrappers and, surprisingly, ATM receipts.

According to media reports, a 5c to 10c levy is to be imposed on every pack of chewing gum, similar to the levy already imposed on the use of plastic bags which, as stated in the e-mail above, "has been the most decisive factor in the cleaning of city streets and even more so of the countryside, where hedgerows, for years festooned with multicoloured plastic bags, are once again blooming in their pristine beauty."

The money generated will be placed in a special environment fund and distributed to local authorities to meet the cost of cleaning streets.

By levying the special tax at point of sale, consumers will pay upfront for the expense of removing their discarded wrappers from public thoroughfares.

To Canadian readers the inclusion of ATM receipts in the scheme will come as a surprise. Here users of ATM machines are cautioned about the danger of throwing away such receipts which may provide valuable information to others. Anyone daft enough to throw away their receipts, instead of depositing them in the receptacle provided, is inviting theft.

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