A street-by-street air quality map for Dublin city has been released by Dublin City Council.
The Google's Project Air View initiative measured the air quality of Dublin city's streets over a period of 16 months and gathered over 50 million pieces of data.
When benchmarked against the provisions of the EU Air Quality Standards 2011, overall, the capital's air quality was deemed to be good.
However, the streets along the quays on either side of the River Liffey in the city centre show relatively elevated Nitrogen Dioxide levels compared to other streets, which could be higher on account of the congestion levels on these quays.
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This video shows the air quality map along the quays in Dublin city
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This video shows the air quality map from Long Mile Road to Dolphin's Barn
The project is a first for an Irish city, and provides unique insights that will enable the council, businesses and citizens to work collaboratively to improve air quality for Dublin.
The data will also be used by DCC to help inform current and future environmental and climate policies, and planning efforts.
All data is now available to view on Google's Environmental Insights Explorer and on Smart Dublin's open data platform.
Local authorities must enforce new laws
Junior Environment Minister Ossian Smyth has said that while the data from Project Airview Dublin is "not live data", it does tell people in general where the problem is.
Minister Smyth said that "half the problem for air pollution" is down to a lot of traffic "idling", while the other half is down to burning solid fuels.
He said that there was a particular problem in the Clare town of Ennis, which he said seemed to be concentrated on the burning of solid fuels.
Minister Smyth said that local authorities had a responsibility to enforce the rules around this, and could do more to bring in more pedestrianisation or cycle lanes to get people out of cars.
He said that new laws to ban the sale of smokey coal, wet wood and damp turf came into force at the end of last year and it was up to local authorities to crack down on that.
