November 28 2015

Irish Water; such a shower of wasters. Today they announced for the umpteenth time their ambition to divert a major portion of the River Shannon to supplement the water shortage in the Capital. It has been pointed out to them on numerous occasions that over twenty years they have destroyed their own water supply and now they want to steal the Shannon to compensate the Dubliners for their executive and planning mistakes.

They originally targeted Lough Ree as their preferred option for an alternative source of a major water supply for Dublin. The locals got organised and ran them off with their ambitions in tatters. The Prodigal was the national Public Relations Officer in the resistance and performed admirably in this role. We established the Shannon Protection Alliance in Athlone in The Green Olive Pub in April 2007. This was in response to;

Dublin City Council’s Water Abstraction Project –

On 31 May 2006, Dublin City Council produced a Strategic Environmental Assessment of the Greater Dublin Water Supply (Major Source Development).

The City Council’s consultants (RPS) recommended water abstraction on a huge, unsustainable scale (600 million litres per day) from the River Shannon as the chosen option, despite identifying almost 60 adverse effects on the Great River and its lakes.

It is curious, that in the exact same time frame, the consultancy company working most closely with RPS (Veolia Water) recommended to Thames Water, the privatised agency which supplies water to the Greater London Area, as well as to the British Government and to the Australian Government that desalination for both London and Melbourne was the answer to maintaining water supplies for these cities into the future. Why would the same consultants recommend massive abstraction from the River Shannon to achieve the same objective? The answer to me was and still remains obvious.

The Dublin Local Authorities desired the commandeering of the Great River to solve a major problem of their own creation, eventually privatise the entire water supply business in Ireland and sell the water back to its rightful riparian owners. Some fucking neck.

At any rate under the presidency of one Mary O’Rourke we took them on, on all fronts and eventually sent them scuttling back to the taxpayer-funded drawing board. That was round one and wasn’t as simple as I have described.


Majestic River Shannon at Dusk

For reasons never yet explained, the consultants identified and designated all of the Greater Dublin Area local Authorities (Dublin City Council, South Dublin County Council, Fingal County Council and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council) as primary, major stakeholders on the Shannon. In addition, Wicklow, Kildare and Meath County Councils were added to the stakeholder list.

This was an act of incredible arrogance, and it would make as much sense for Cavan, Clare, Leitrim, Longford and Tipperary to decree themselves to be major stakeholders on the Liffey. The Dublin City Authorities never had any traditional, legal, moral or riparian right to claim any jurisdiction over the River Shannon.

The Shannon Protection Alliance (SPA) was established to oppose this ludicrous proposal. We recruited two of Ireland’s foremost experts on hydrology and ecosystems to research the proposed project on our behalf. Financing of our reports was provided by public donations, sponsorship and fundraising; while the multiple millions spent by Dublin City Council and its consultants fell as a burden on the Irish Taxpayer, without his or her knowledge or consent. We found it curious, that despite requesting the CV’s of the experts who worked on behalf of Dublin City Council, they consistently refused, neglected or failed to provide this information over a four year period!

In this timeframe, our experts (Jack O’Sullivan, Environmental Scientist, and Dr Paul Johnson, Hydrologist at the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, Trinity College, Dublin) produced three detailed reports which confirmed that the entire project proposed by Dublin City Council and its consultants was and remains totally unsustainable and cannot not be entertained at any level.

A summary of their very exhaustive and comprehensive reports is provided in the following pages, and it is an absolute fact that not one of their findings or conclusions has ever been challenged by either Dublin City Council, Irish Water or any consultants working on the project.

The situation has changed somewhat in the intervening period with the establishment of Irish Water and its role in the water supply issue to Dublin. John Tierney was the leading proponent of the original lunatic plan in his capacity as Manager and supreme wizard of Dublin City Council. The biggest waster in the history of statutory corporate waste who should have been sacked for inefficiency was given a horizontal transfer into Irish Water as its new CEO. Beat that!

As Enda says “the best little country in the world to do business in”.