LABOUR councillor Elena Secas has urged Limerick City and County Council (LCCC) to call for an independent evaluation of the Shannon Water Supply Project.
She also wants the local authority to write to the Department of Housing, Local Government, and Heritage and Uisce Éireann to request that no planning application is submitted until the independent evaluation is complete.
“This project’s initial cost was €700million. This cost has since increased to €6billion.This is a huge increase and this factor alone should be more than enough to call for an independent evaluation of the project before any planning application is made to An Bord Pleanála,” she said at the recent full meeting of LCCC.
“Some €80million has already been spent on the Shannon Pipeline by Uisce Éireann, this could have been used to sort out most of the problems Dublin is experiencing.”
Cllr Secas referenced a recent report by McCarthy Hyder which said there were 800 kilometres of 100-year-old iron pipes in Dublin that are “beyond repair to extensive corrosion”.
She hit out that “most of Uisce Éireann’s proposals are in terms of leakage reduction, with less emphasis on core pipeline renewal, if this proposal goes ahead and will bring water 175 kilometres across the country, the water will simply end up in the ground”.
The Labour councillor said that councillors need to know what the environmental consequences of the project will be, citing fears around declines in salmon, eel, and bird populations.
“If this project goes ahead, it will more likely result in further deterioration of habitats,” she said.
“To get answers to these concerns, we do need an independent evaluation.”
She also expressed fears around the “multitude of agencies and committees, both within and outside Uisce Éireann” and statutory organisations involved in the project, stating that there is a “possibility for the fundamental basics to be lost along the way”.
“We only need to look at the situation with the new children’s hospital or the Shannon Tunnel for which the State has to pay a surcharge annually because it got the go ahead on faulty traffic projections.”
“To avoid a similar situation developing here, we must act now, we need to get an independent evaluation of the whole Shannon pipeline project before it goes for planning.”
