Shannon supplying water to Dublin?

Plans to pump water from the River Shannon to service the Dublin region’s ever-growing appetite have met resistance in the midlands, despite promises of jobs and tourism. It all boils down to trust, writes KATHY SHERIDAN

“Water is life. It’s the briny broth of our origins, the pounding circulatory system of the world. We stake our civilisations on the coasts and mighty rivers. Our deepest dread is the threat of having too little – or too much”. Barbara Kingsolver, writing in National Geographic.

TOO LITTLE water? What are the chances, in a country mildewed, sodden, pummelled with the stuff? Returning from Athlone on Wednesday, this writer was briefly stranded when flash floods pounded both lanes of the town’s bypass. Similar downpours forced traffic to a stop on the N7 and even discommoded Dublin 4. And all in high summer.

Which is a touch ironic since the purpose of the Athlone trip was to tease out a €500 million proposal to pipe vast quantities of water all the way from Lough Derg on the River Shannon to the greater Dublin region.

Yes, the waters of the Shannon – not the mighty Liffey – are destined some day to slake the thirst of exploding Dublin and its environs.

The population of the Dublin region is predicted to reach 2.2 million by 2031. Currently, it needs some 550 million litres of treated water a day to keep its 1.5 million inhabitants happy. Within 21 years, that will climb to 800 million litres a day, a 350 million litre deficit, which will be abstracted from Lough Derg and piped all the way to Dublin, via a massive reservoir in Co Offaly – if Dublin City Council gets its way.

The carrot for the midlands is the plan to set the reservoir in a cutaway Bord na Móna bog that would double as “an innovative water-based eco park, with fishing, boating, cycling, water and leisure sports”, with the promise of 1,000 construction jobs, plus long-term tourism and recreation employment for the region.

On radio this week, the chief executive of Bord na Móna, Gabriel D’Arcy suggested that the board’s motivation was to alleviate the “quite extensive flooding” in the Shannon basin. Its engineers had begun to look at cutaway bogs as flood plains, he said, and to identify certain natural reservoir areas, when they became aware of a Dublin City Council study looking at water needs for the eastern part of the country including the Dublin local authorities, plus Meath, Kildare, Offaly, Wicklow and Westmeath.

A plan was born. Take the water from the west, store it in a reservoir/recreational water park in the midlands and sell it to the east. “Along the Shannon, there is flooding for eight months of the year. Why can’t I use that water, store it, treat it and disseminate it?” asked D’Arcy.

So why can’t he?

Charlie Flanagan TD, who represents Laois-Offaly, has no problem with it and thinks that it’s “quite exciting” in fact. “This plan appears to be more than pie in the sky and deserves every consideration.”

But it’s not that simple. There are issues of trust; resentment at the historical neglect of these waterways by the agencies that now covet them; a sense that Dublin gambled with unsustainable growth and now expects the Shannon to cover the losses.

For now, the main forces against the plan are farmers and anglers. But this is no clear-cut rural-versus-urban scenario. The farmers and anglers agree on only a few important points. Both insist the plan will do nothing to alleviate flooding and that it’s cynical to suggest otherwise. They hold Bord na Móna responsible for the silting of the waterways, and finger this as a prime cause of the summer – and some of the winter – flooding.

Both groups are calling for a single regulatory authority, with teeth, to manage the waterways (as is Fine Gael). And both look askance at the notion that the ESB – a key stakeholder of the Shannon – should be in line for compensation for loss of generating capacity, if the plan goes ahead. “I think it’s ironic if they can get compensation,” says east Galway farmer and chairman of the Irish Farmer’s Association (IFA) flood project team, Michael Silke. “We always felt they had a responsibility for holding back water at artificially high levels or at least had some call on it . . . Effectively they own the water.

“I find the idea of compensation going into their coffers rather difficult to take, considering the amount of suffering that people have endured [in the floods].”

And that’s where consensus ends. Chairman of the Shannon Protection Alliance (SPA) Martin McEnroe claims, for example, that abstraction of such huge volumes of water would dry up the Inny and Cross rivers, plus all the feeder streams that are “the veins and arteries of Lough Ree, the spawning grounds for all aquatic life in the Shannon”. Michael Silke, however, sees nothing wrong with shipping surplus water to Dublin.

“We’ve an abundance of water . . . My land has been flooded and half the farm submerged in three to four feet of water for three years. This plan won’t solve the flooding but I believe it makes good sense to share an abundance with those who need it.”

The anglers’ catch-cry, by contrast, is “Not a bucket!”

Mary O’Rourke, TD for Longford-Westmeath and president of the SPA, called it the “rape of our water”, when the proposers appeared to be setting their sights on Lough Ree. But it was never going to happen to Lough Ree, she says happily, not with a midlands Taoiseach and a lot of high-powered midlands connections. “I don’t think it will go into the history books but we think we saved Athlone. We fought it tenaciously. They [the proposers] said: ‘We’ll be needing the water for Dublin but we’ll be taking it in a sensitive way’,” she says scornfully. “We called it what it was – they were going to pillage our water.”

Happily for O’Rourke and the Athlone campaigners, the fickle finger moved on and has landed on Lough Derg, where Joe O’Donoghue of the Lough Derg Anglers Association, a man who says he has “no vested interest and nothing to gain from the water but the pleasure of being on it”, gets to the nub of the matter: “If water is abstracted, if that pipe goes in at all, we’re lost.” Isn’t that a bit dramatic? “No, it’s not. At that point we would have no control whatever over what was being abstracted.”

This is where the trust deficit stings. “The operators might say they need 350 million litres a day – but what will happen if the need exceeds that?” asks O’Donoghue. “All it will take is a ministerial order to raise the volume being abstracted . . . And who’s going to know? Who is going to monitor those conditions and say ‘stop’ when conditions aren’t right?

“If you could trust the powers that be to only take the water at high times. But you can be sure of one thing: never, ever, ever, will Dubliners be told their water supply will be cut off.” And clearly, the view is that no minister can be trusted with such a choice anyway.

Donal Whelan, who describes himself as “dogsbody secretary” of a fishing group on Lough Derg, notes that initially they were told abstraction would happen in winter time only, “but then they began talking about taking of water ‘that would reflect the flow of the water’ – which is a kind of a ‘get out of jail card’. It’s down the road that people are concerned about.” But this is about much more than angling concerns, says Joe O’Donoghue.

“Say an industry was thinking about coming to this area, one that needed a good reliable supply of water. We tick all the boxes here. We have an airport nearby, good roads, a good, educated workforce, but we’ve committed the water to Dublin. So we’re no longer ticking all the boxes. We’re cutting our own throats. We need jobs here too. I’ve a son, a draughtsman, who’s out of work.”

With Dublin already at bursting point, they argue, why not take industry to the water, instead of shipping water to industry? Meanwhile, Nenagh hasn’t had a new industry in 20 years.

It was a point strongly made at a “robust” two-and-a-half hour meeting in Nenagh this week, called to hear RPS consultants try to sell the project. Why, asked one participant, was Fingal County Council getting the go-ahead for thousands of new houses, a whole new town, if the county couldn’t maintain a water supply?

There were cries of “not a drop”, talk of “raping the Shannon”, critical remarks about sending “our water to be leaked through the pipes of Dublin”. But there was a general feeling, says Whelan, that it does make sense to abstract water in high-flow periods, under very strict conditions. “The only problem is that a lot of people don’t have trust. A ministerial order could change that at a stroke. It’s a difficult one. There’s a lack of confidence in the controls. You’ll know eventually that it’s happened but by then it’s too late.”

IT ALWAYS COMES BACK TO TRUST , and because most people who have an affiliation with water know its value and therefore the dangers of privatisation, there is deep suspicion in many circles about where such a commercial venture might take them.

“If they go to the expense of putting in pipelines and pumps and put in filtering stations on the shores of Lough Derg, Bord na Móna immediately has a hold on clean water and can sell it anywhere it wants,” says O’Donoghue. Whelan adds: “At least Bord na Móna is a semi-State, but nobody knows who’ll come into the mixture.”

The carrot of the eco park and 1,000 jobs doesn’t cut much ice with Martin McEnroe, either, who has laboured over many years to defend waterways and restore water quality: “A thousand jobs and a new lake are very laudable. But hasn’t Cavan a lake for every day of the year? We have enough lakes. If we could only look after the ones we have already . . .We have 240 miles of river and three main lakes – Lough Allen, Lough Ree and Lough Derg. The money and management are not going in to protect those. Most of the work on the Shannon has been carried out by angling clubs.”

O’Donoghue recalls the epic battle 12 years ago to retrieve the water quality in Lough Derg amid public uproar. “All that time, when we were fighting our case, we never heard a word from Dublin – but now, it’s not our water; now it belongs to all Ireland.”

“The real agenda,” suggests veteran campaigner PJ Walsh, is to give Dublin City Council control of the Shannon, all 240 miles of it, running through 18 counties, none of which happens to be Dublin.

“There are at least 30 agencies – including the 18 county councils – with an interest in the Shannon, but no single responsible authority with teeth. Not one of those councils is to be consulted by Dublin City Council, which has no historical, legal or any other basis to decree itself to be the 19th stakeholder. It would make as much sense for Longford to declare itself a stakeholder of the Liffey,” he says.

“The last pirates on the Shannon were the Danes,” says Walsh. “They came from Dublin – ironically – round the coast, up through Limerick and all they took were the ecclesiastical artefacts and the occasional fed-up nun. And their entire escapades were brought to a conclusion under the terms of the first Good Friday agreement at Clontarf, courtesy of Brian Boru.

“In the intervening 1,000 years, we’ve had no raiding party on the Shannon – until now and ironically, the pirates emanate from the same source and will be repudiated with the same force.”

Among the weaponry is a complaint to Brussels from the National Angling Council of Ireland, about the “adverse effects” of the proposal, says McEnroe.

“They’ll be examining the Water Framework Directive, the Habitat Directive and the Bird Directive, all to see if the proposal is in conflict with them. The whole of the Shannon is an SAC [Special Area of Conservation] of course.”

Bord na Móna’s Gabriel D’Arcy – speaking from the company’s Lanesboro works, where 90mms of rain fell on Wednesday – concedes the reservoir will not solve the flooding problem, “but it is one element of a number of factors that will help to alleviate it”.

He rejects the pollution claims, saying Bord na Móna owns only 37,000 of the 200,000 hectares of peatland in the Shannon catchment, that all its bog areas have been under Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) control for 10 years and that it had been using silting technology for the previous 12 or 13 years.

“I’m not going to answer for what happened [with the silting of the waterways]. The vast majority of peatland is not owned by Bord na Móna and we’re the only ones under EPA control,” he says, pointing to “a lot of agricultural activity” in those areas.

Bord na Móna clarifies the role of a private company, Veolia Water. Veolias expertise was brought in by RPS to deal only with the part of the report relating to desalination, according to a Bord na Móna spokesperson.

D’Arcy says: “This is a key piece of national infrastructure; ownership of the reservoir and the water will always remain within the State. It’s very, very clear that the sole custodian of this is the Department of the Environment. They are the people on whose instructions Dublin City Council acted as the lead player in this process.”

As for trust in the implementation of water abstraction agreements, he points to his model of sustainable development: the Rutland reservoir in England, operated by a partnership between Anglian Water, the Rutland Wildlife Trust and local authorities. An important part of the deal is that Anglian cannot move water levels without getting the permission of English Nature (the equivalent of Ireland’s Parks & Wildlife department), D’Arcy says.

He concedes that Bord na Móna has a vested interest in chasing new projects as peat will run out in 10 to 15 years. But there is no doubting his enthusiasm for the achievements of the UK partnership in the Rutland reservoir, which attracts a million visitors a year.

Whether the eco-park will be enough to pull this plan through the sticky years of consultation is another matter.

“This could get very hot if people begin to realise what’s at stake,” says Joe O’Donoghue.

Do you ever get the feeling that Ireland is just... broken?