'Trolleywatch' exhibition to open in Navan tonight
By Tess Coe
An exhibition of photographs, entitled 'Trolleywatch' taken by Filipino-native camera man Spencer Marcos will open tonight in Navan.
Marcos, who has been living in Navan since 2012, started taking photographs of abandoned shopping trolleys around Navan over the past year.
“I never saw anything like it before,” he said.
“Every evening when I got off the bus from work in Dublin, I would see trolleys just left everywhere on the streets, on the footpaths, down alleyways, outside shops and apartments. It just seems to be treated as normal,” he said.
“I watched what was happening, and discovered people were bringing their trolley load of shopping to the bus stop, getting on the bus and leaving the trolley behind. Others were bringing shopping to their apartments and just leaving the trolleys outside on the footpaths.”
He said it is most untidy and creates an eyesore around the town.
“Of course, the trolleys then become a vehicle for all kinds of high jinks when the pubs start to empty,” he adds.
“The incredible thing was that when we started sharing the photos on Facebook, especially on the Meath Chronicle page, people began attacking the Chronicle for posting pictures of trolleys - nobody seemed put out that the town was being littered with trolleys. There has been a normalisation of it, like it has become acceptable behaviour.
“It's not – it wouldn't even be acceptable at home in the Philippines,” Marcos, a distant relative of the former Filipino president, Ferdinand Marcos, and his wife, shoe-loving Imelda, says.
He adds that the worst comments was when a trolley was pictured outside a local TD's office.
“People didn't appreciate the humour of that one,” he laughs.
His exhibition features photographs of trolleys in different locations around the town, outside nightclubs, pubs – even one in the flowerbed of St Mary's Church, in the middle of the begonias.
The exhibition is being sponsored by Ben Dunne Gyms and will open at 7pm in the Russell Room of the Central Hotel on Market Square. All are welcome, and the guest speaker is the chairperson of the newly-formed Tidy Towns committee in Navan, Cllr Michael Francis Thornton. It will run for the month of April.