America may well be the land of opportunity but Castleisland is most certainly the town of opportunists.
Take the disgraceful vista of the designated area for the collection from last week’s County Clean-Up activity at Tonbwee off Barrack Street.
The one ‘official’ KWD red bag visible was completely smothered and outnumbered by the unofficial / unlawful kind and it only got worse as the weekend approached with a further deterioration by Sunday morning.
All Human Life
An angry Cllr. Charlie Farrelly was at the site on Sunday morning and he managed to ‘hunt’ a man who arrived with a consignment of household waste.
Every imaginable kind of unloved household waste was there. Pots and pans, doors and windows, closets and presses, bed and garden furniture, perfectly reusable timber and wrought iron work and a collection of incontinence pads to top it off.
Bob O On the Ball
Local recycling specialist Bob O’Brien arrived and immediately opened the back doors of his van as he realised the vast potential of the Barrack Street bonanza before him.
By Sunday morning the site had become a drive-by, locally created, tourism site and there were some outstanding examples of rubber-necking as vehicles slowed down to have a gawk at the site’s growing infamy.
There were people who genuinely believed that the occasion and the site itself were there at their disposal and that the whole thing was a bit of a free-for-all and an opportunity knocks sort of an affair.
Opportunity Not to be Missed
The more that came there with their cast-offs the more the belief grew that this was indeed an opportunity not to be missed – and God they didn’t miss out.
One can only guess that the sense of opportunity arose from the initiative of years ago when, in an effort to halt the continuing problem of countryside dumping, Kerry County Council organised collection points for just the kind of stuff which triggered the tourism flash mob at the weekend.
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