With Irish Water intending to brief TD’s and Senators today, in Dublin’s Buswell’s Hotel, on their final details of its €1.2 billion project to pipe water from the river Shannon to Dublin; there is likely to be intense local opposition to the plans from rural farming groups and local residents.
Oireachtas members have today been invited to a presentation on the final preferred route, understood to stretch from the Parteen Basin through counties Tipperary and Offaly to Peamount in South Co. Dublin. The project to pipe water from the river Shannon to Dublin is aimed at supplying some 330 million litres to our capital city. Irish Water confirm this same supply on a daily basis would be the equivalent in size to the capacity of 125 Olympic size swimming pools, with same including not just a drinking supply, but also water for necessary industrial requirements.
Calls to repair the existing leakages to conserve water, estimated at 40% of Dublin’s current existing supplies within the city’s existing infrastructure, have being dismissed as being insufficient to meet future need, with the population of the greater Dublin area expected to rise from 1.5 million presently, to an estimated 2.1 million by 2050.
Compensation to the ESB is expected to cost the State about €1 million a year for their lost generating capacity, while compensation to land owners; required to grant a 50m wide way-leave for construction, to in future become a 20m way-leave when completed, has not been fully estimated, but will be negotiated with representative organisations, including angling bodies, tourism interests, the Irish Farmers Association and the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association, using the existing methodology which currently applies when compensating those inconvenienced by gas pipeline construction.
Those opposed to the project claim that construction of this project is simply the building of a piece of infrastructure which, in the future, developed as a State asset, will be sold off to yet another foreign ‘Vulture Fund’.
Wasting OUR money.