There’s hardly a person reading this who cannot remember his or her childhood days and being yanked back at the door with:

“Come back here you, did you wash your face, did you brush your teeth, you, your hair is a mess, don’t you know cleanliness is next to Godliness?”, and so on.

But just the same those grown ups were concerned with our sense of well-being and self-esteem, to say nothing of hygiene and what the neighbours might think.

Mister everyman will have little scientific knowledge, but just the same he can’t help judging the book by it’s cover nor the river Dodder by the state of its banks and bed.

From the bridge at Londonbridge Road down to the ‘gut’ where it meets the Liffey, the river is in an awful state. Stand at the riverside walkway at Stella Gardens and gaze: Garda traffic cones, old tyres, a shopping basket or two and all kinds of junk lie there.

To the back of O’Rahilly House there lies, embedded like the spine of a great whale, the carcase of a boat.

Can anyone name it, or say how long it has been there? Entangled in the ribs is a length of orange plastic,the type with strong coarse mesh that the Corporation men surround dangerous holes with.
On the road, this keeps humans out of trouble, in the river bed at full tide its presence is a lurking, sinister danger.

That, then, is the visual pollution and if it is anything to go by, what is the man in the street to think when he sees the oily slime that passes by at full tide, for the Dodder is a tidal animal. Are there toxic chemicals ‘in it. What is the bacterial score?

The recent outbreak of Cryptosporidium, (an organism that causes dysentry) in Irish rivers in 1996 and 1997, makes one wonder about the way the river is managed, and there is also Leptospirosis, a fatal disease of the liver and kidneys which can be carried by rats.

How do we gauge a measure of safety to ourselves when we throw a stick for Rover to fetch, that he won’t come out of the water shaking infected droplets of river gunge all over us? Rover can die of Leptospirosis just as we can, but Rover has probably had his shots. Has his owner had them?

There was a time when Dodderside residents and even the local politicians used to organise us to get out and get the gloves and wellies and get into it on a nasty, wet day out. God be with the days and forgive them for ruining our Saturdays in front of the telly. But who remembers Garret Fitzgerald, Ruairi Quinn, Declan Costelloe and Joe Doyle up to their oxters in mud on a major clean up campaign?

There was a time when the river was used for rowing practice, when there was a sand bank instead of a mud bank just below the bridge at Lansdowne and youngsters could swim in the river.
There was a time when the sea otter brought her cubs up the river after fat sea trout. We still have the kingfishers and the herons and the water voles, (the poor fellows get mistaken for rats), but with the present state of the river one wonders for how much longer.

Stand at the quay below the Community Centre in Thorncastle Street, when the tide is out. The bed of the Liffey looks like the village dump, a television, and a computer lie in the mud, but unlike the wooden crates these don’t rot, they are not biodegradable and neither are the plastic containers.

Our area is blessed with environmental riches. But we have a long way to go to clean up ouract. Many of the pallets, collected for the Halloween bonfire, ended up strewn along the riverbank.