Tànaiste Leo Varadkar has called on Dublin City Council (DCC) to provide more public toilets and bins for people to avail of in the capital.
Following the scenes of large crowds gathering on South William Street and other areas around the city over the weekend, Dublin City Council’s response has been heavily criticised.
During an interview on RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne, Dublin City Council’s director of city recovery Coilín O’Reilly raised concerns about what could happen if extra bins and toilets are provided.
“We feel that if we provide toilets and bins at these locations, it’ll only drive more footfall and create more of an issue from a public health perspective,” he said.
O'Reilly added: "If we supply more toilets and bins, does that bring more people in? Do we end up with bigger public health issues? It’s a very difficult situation to manage.
However, during an interview with Newstalk, Leo Varadkar has called on the Dublin City Council to do more.
"For a start, I'd like to see more bins. I spent a bit of time on Sunday around Herbert Park and there were more bins, but they need more too. I would definitely like to see more provision of public facilities and public loos. Having said that though, we think we may be able to get around that by allowing premises to reopen their bathrooms for the public to use - for example, pubs, restaurants, shops to allow people to use"
During the discussion, the Tànaiste also ruled out the potential of moving up the planned reopening of outdoor dining and drinks.
At present, pubs and restaurants are set to open their doors on June 7 but given the shortage of bathrooms and the increase in litter, the Fine Gael leader was asked if opening these premises sooner could help alleviate this problem.
However he responded: "The decision is Monday and that's what's going to happen. That's the Cabinet decision on that. We did toy with that possibility but we're not going to change it now. It does appear that the weather is not going to be so nice this weekend, unfortunately, but that's probably a good thing in terms of people congregating outside."
Over the weekend, Gardaí cleared large numbers of people from St Stephen’s Green, South William Street and areas of Cork and Galway, with a series of arrests being made for public order offences.
However, the Tànaiste stressed that while these scenes were unfortunate, they're not representative of the larger situation.
"I will say this though, I didn't like seeing the scenes that we saw in South Wiliam Street, or some of the problems that we saw in Cork and places like Portobello Plaza. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that we are actually encouraging people to be outdoors. Outdoors is much safer than indoors.
"What I saw around town yesterday was people gathering in the outdoors responsibly, sitting in relatively small groups. It's important to note that I think there's a risk always when a video goes up on Twitter of a certain number of people misbehaving in a certain number of places. There can be a bit of an overreaction to it.
"The vast majority of people are following the guidelines, they're meeting up in back gardens in groups of no more than three households and if they aren't meeting in parks. They're keeping the numbers really small."
During the interview, the Tànaiste also provided some details about the Pandemic Unemployment Payment and discussed the introduction of a new pandemic dividend support scheme.
He added: "Today there are still 300,000 people who are claiming the Pandemic Unemployment Payment, these are people who used to be working, who want to work again but who currently can't. That's a huge number of people. There are still tens of thousands of businesses that are either not open or partially open and may struggle to survive.
"In this Department, I've taken employment affairs to the Department that they didn't previously deal with. There's an opportunity to do something that I want to do - which is to bring about pandemic dividends to make sure that we don't just go back to the kind of economy and society we had before.
"That's why I'm very committed to things like the move to a living wage, the introduction of sick pay which we're working on at the moment. I'm working with Minister Humphries on the whole idea of auto-enrolment, ending the pension apartheid that exists in Ireland where public servants like me and many others have very good very secure pensions but more than half of people in the private sector are reliant only on the state pension. These are the kind of big changes I think we can make that helps us to build a better society and a better economy once this is over."
