What's the story with decluttering?

In between visits to the garden centre, cutting the grass and other springtime pursuits you find yourself engaged in this bank holiday Monday, today might be a good day to clear out your wardrobes, cupboards and CD racks of all that stuff you have no longer any need for so you can pass them on to someone who does.

Oxfam Ireland wants to help you with your spring cleaning and is running an extensive promotional campaign under the banner of "Clear Your Gear". The charity is looking for donations of unused clothes, books, CDs and any other bric-a-brac you might have outgrown.

If you're a bit of a hoarder and find it next to impossible to say goodbye to things you've long since stopped using because of the memories associated with them or because you fear they may some day become absolutely vital again, the charity has come up with a few tips which should help you make a clean break.

If you haven't worn certain clothes or shoes, used kitchenware or listened to particular CDs in the last 12 months then chances are you probably never will again. It doesn't matter how much the shoes once cost or how fashionable the top may have been, now they're just taking up space and confusing you when you go to get dressed every day. To prevent further accumulation in the future, resolve to give old stuff away as soon as you've found a replacement.

And if, for emotional reasons, you can't bear to give something away right now, it might be less of a wrench to store it until this time next year. Not only will your house look better freed from the clutter, if you haven't missed the stuff after a year you can probably safely pass them on.

Finally, the charity suggests, you should never keep items with "negative" emotional energy attached. So if you have a gorgeous hand-carved rocking chair, it might be best to just let it go if it always makes you think of the ex who cruelly dumped you while sitting on it.

Like all charities, Oxfam Ireland faces growing competition for your reusable items, not only from other charities, but from auction sites such as eBay and the freecycle online communities, which put people who need stuff in touch with others who have stuff they no longer want.

NEITHER OF THESE web-based options can compete with the modern-day rag-and-bone men who have replaced horse and carts with considerably more cost efficient, but sometimes morally questionable collection methods.

There are scores of commercial collectors in business in Ireland all too eager to prey on our passivity. Some use bogus charity numbers and misleading flyers to create the impression that the money generated through the sale of discarded items finds its way to charitable causes in the developing world when this could not be further from the truth.

But there is nothing that can be done to stop them. Local authorities accept that such collectors present a growing problem but say it is very hard to effectively police.

The Garda says that as the collectors' activities do not fall under legislation governing on-street and house-to-house collections, they are powerless to intervene.

"No one is saying that there shouldn't be commercial rag merchants - they will say that they are providing a service and that is fine - but so many are misleading people," says Trevor Anderson, the retail manager of Oxfam Ireland. He blames the dramatic fall-off in donations charity shops receive with the proliferation of such collectors. "We started getting less donations about three years ago and that coincided with an upsurge in the number of commercial collectors," he says.

Charity shops could increase their turnover by about 50 per cent or €10 million annually if all the material that ends up in bags on doorsteps all over the country was re-routed to charity shops.

Anderson suggests that the local authorities run information campaigns, as they do in the North, to highlight the problem. "This is not something that we are looking at at the moment," a Dublin City Council spokesman told PriceWatch. This pretty much leaves it up to individuals to bin the bogus bags.

OXFAM IRELAND, MEANWHILE, is gearing up for the next element of its clutter-free campaign through the launch next month of a targeted appeal seeking your old CDs and vinyl records.

The charity believes that with the move toward digital music gathering pace, there are millions of CDs lying around which have been ripped onto PCs and MP3 players and which could now be put to better use in any one of its 44 charity shops.

Although quite how much PriceWatch can get for the collection of dreadful indie 12-inches that we shamefully stumbled upon in the attic recently is anyone's guess.