Councillors fume over expense of piping water from River Shannon to Dublin

The decision of the Government to allow Uisce Éireann to continue its plans to extract huge volumes of water from the River Shannon at Parteen, near Birdhill, and pipe it to Dublin has been described as “tragic” by Nenagh councillor Séamie Morris, as he was joined by a number of other local councillors who have criticised the scheme.

The Independent Nenagh councillor said it was “mind boggling” that the Government was going to allow Irish Water to spend up to €6 billion on developing the scheme.

Speaking at last Thursday’s agm of the Nenagh Municipal District authority, Cllr Morris said the scheme would have “an incredible effect” on the entire Mid West region if it was allowed to proceed.

To see such huge amounts of money being spent on the project was galling for a number of small communities in North Tipperary, especially as Uisce Éireann had failed to provided them with long-awaited basic water supply and waste water treatment infrastructure.

One of the biggest ground water resources in the country was much closer to the Dublin region, but Uisce Éireann had decided not to tap into it and was instead pursuing the highly expensive pipe project, said Cllr Morris.

He said the cost of the project had grown from an initial estimate of €700,000 to a current figure of €6 billion. The overall cost was going to make the bill for the new National Children’s Hospital look like good value for money.

Cllr Morris added that one of the impacts locals had expressed concern about was that the pipeline would pass under the lake at Ashley Park. He predicted that this would drain the lake dry because that water body was a turlough.

He said that eventuality could have a big impact on the Ashley Park facility itself, one of the best wedding venues in the country, and which provided a big economic spinoff for the Nenagh area.

“We don’t have enough water for our own people here in this area and we are going to now allow Irish Water take 300 million litres a day out of the Shannon,” said Cllr Morris.

That extra water from the Shannon was going to put even more pressure on the leaking pipes all over Dublin and make things worse. The country was broke twice in recent decades and now it’s going to be broke again if this goes ahead, Cllr Morris warned.

Fine Gael councillor Phyll Bugler said she and people in her area of Ballina were also very concerned about the impact the extraction of such huge volumes of water would have on the local environment. She said the pipeline entailed taking a 50 metres wide corridor of farmland all the way over the distance of 172kms from Parteen to Dublin. The pipe itself would be around 12 metres in diameter.

Cllr Bugler said that over her 30 years living in the Ballina area, she had personally witnessed the water levels fall by up to two feet in dry summers. It was very worrying for the people of the area who depended so much on angling, boating and tourism in general.

“In terms of the local environment and ecology, what kind of legacy are we going to leave to our children?” she asked.

“I do not see the sense of piping water all the way to Dublin – it seems archaic and its seems a sledgehammer is being used to crack a nut.”

Cllr Bugler queried why water had to be pumped to the capital city to support growth when that growth could happen in the Mid West region. “Why is the industry not coming down to us; this is very serious for us.”

Cllr John Carroll said one way of ensuring the project did not proceed would be to have “people power” locally that was opposed to the scheme.

Newly elected Fianna Fáil councillor Ryan O’ Meara said the expensive scheme was hard for people in villages such as Ballycommon and Coughjordan to stomach as Uisce Éireann had not even provided them with proper waste water treatment facilities. Failure to provide this basic infrastructure meant there was a stall on development of new housing which were desperately needed in the two villages.

Cllr Morris asked that Tipperary County Council to link with other local authorities in the Mid West to do an needs analysis on the water required in the region itself. “The perception is that we have loads of water in the Mid West, but we do not,”he said.

Cathaoirleach Fiona Bonfield said the amount of money being spent on the pipe plan was crazy.