  The physics of galaxy clusters has proven to be influenced by several
processes connected with their galactic component which pollutes the ICM with
metals, stars and dust. However, it is not clear whether the presence of
diffuse dust can play a role in clusters physics since a characterisation of
the IR properties of galaxy clusters is yet to be completely achieved. We focus
on the recent work of Giard et al. (2008) who performed a stacking analysis of
the IRAS data in the direction of several thousands of galaxy clusters,
providing a statistical characterisation of their IR luminosity and redshift
evolution. We model the IR properties of the galactic population of the
SDSS-maxBCG clusters (0.1<z<0.3) in order to check if it accounts for the
entire observed signal and to constrain the possible presence of other
components, like dust in the ICM. Starting from the optical properties of the
galaxy members, we estimate their emission in the 60 and 100 micron IRAS bands
making use of modeled SEDs of different spectral types (E/S0, Sa, Sb, Sc and
starburst). We also consider the evolution of the galactic
population/luminosity with redshift. Our results indicate that the galactic
emission, which is dominated by the contribution of star-forming galaxies, is
consistent with the observed signal. In fact, our model slightly overestimates
the observed fluxes, with the excess being concentrated in low-redshift
clusters (z <~ 0.17). This indicates that, if present, the IR emission from
intracluster dust must be very small. We obtain an upper limit on the
dust-to-gas mass ratio in the ICM of Z_d <~ 5 10^-5. The excess in luminosity
obtained at low redshift constitutes an indication that the cluster environment
is driving a process of star-formation quenching in its galaxy members.
