THIS WEEK WAS marked by the proliferation of horse shit in Dublin.

A public exposed to bags and bags of the stuff. A mess exposing a failure of administration, organisation and planning that so characterises the approach of those responsible for running the country.

But enough about the government’s approach to the public sector strikes. 

Now, if it were up to me, this would be the part of the column where a loud air horn sounds and all the readers go nuts and I run through the crowd getting a bunch of hi-fives for my joke and everyone chants “Carl! Carl! Carl!” Alas, there are cruel limits to the written medium. 

No, but seriously folks, there does appear to be an epidemic of horse manure affecting parts of North Dublin since a manure treatment plant in Dublin 8 closed last year. Sinn Féin councillor Séamas McGrattan estimated that over 500 bags of horse manure have been dumped in Cabra alone in the past six weeks. God help whatever poor staffer he sent out to count them.

Asked whether they were going to do anything about it, Dublin City Council said, and I am paraphrasing somewhat here: “No.” It is startling to think that Horse Racing Ireland received €81.2 million in the budget earlier this month and not a single cent of that has been spent on a public restroom for horses. Though, to be fair, if you go around Ireland, there are very few public restrooms for humans either.

The apparent unwillingness of Dublin City Council to accept that they might have a role in keeping the city free of hundreds of bags of literal, and I cannot stress this enough, horse shit, does seem somewhat parallel with the lumbering, lackadaisical way that the government has chosen to address the issue of public sector pay in Ireland during a........

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