Shannon water for Dublin

This is old news. I heard about this project in the1990s. Have a look who owns the land in midlands for the resevoir. That is how I knew it woild happen.

They're not taking any of the water going through Athlone. This has nothing to do with flood relief and will not decrease the water levels during winter. The main concerns with this scheme are around water levels during the summer and particularly during a drought.

Considering the huge amounts of rainfall we have had recently, and presumeably will be getting more often due to climate change, instead of this huge engineering works, why not build a couple of reservoirs near Dublin?

No. Concentrate on fixing the leaks. Or else, you're spending all that money, to pipe all that water, to have it wasted.

It's logic like that that created this bat sh*t idea to begin with.

How do I know that the rain in the area 1 hour from Dublin has been enough up until now? Well it's what kept the people of Dublin hydrated so far. Its the leaks and mis-management that have created this problem.

I was watching Long Way Round the other night. Ewan Mcgregor and Charlie Borman ride motorcycles from London to New York. They came across a town in Russia(might have been Mongolia), where the government diverted the water from a lake to another area, and the entire lake dried up. There were fishing boats that just dropped onto dry ground and no-one had the money to retrieve them. Once the lake dried up the town basically dried up.

I am far from an Eco warrior, but I really do think this whole scheme is mad and might have unforeseen circumstances.

Could we not try the "building reservoirs" idea first?

You started a very humorous and extensive thread on this already five years ago; do you not feel like you got enough answers then?

The problem with this is the integrity of the Headrace canal walls/embankments, which are surveyed on a daily basis. The water levels in the headrace apparently need to be kept within specific levels to stop the embankments from moving. But I'd imagine that the remedial works on that are not insurmountable in relation to the proposed scale of this overall project.

I used to work for a software company. I suppose their only sins were a lack of leadership and having too much money at their disposal(sound familiar?). There is a software tool called a SIEM Security event and information monitor. It monitors events on network devices. They bought one, they aren't cheap, and it was able to monitor all the network devices except one particular vendor. If I had been in charge, considering they were a software company with 9000 software engineers at their disposal, I would have put 5 of the best and the brightest in a room with as much pizza and Dr Pepper as they wanted and had them build a translator, or a parsing engine or something to make the SIEM work with that vendors products. Instead, they bought a second SIEM that could translate and display events from those endpoints. One problem though, the second SIEM would not talk to the first SIEM. Again, they didn't go with my idea of getting 5 guys or girls in a room, instead, they bought a third SIEM, which was able to talk to the other two.

This plan reminds me of that scenario. An insurmountable problem (fixing the leaks)and an easy fix which just involves throwing some money at it. Except the quick fix might have unexpected consequences and might end up costing a lot more than originally thought.

That is a different issue, you were raising the problems with the NCH as a reason to stop this project. They aren't, the project either needs to be done or it doesn't. Fixing the problems with public procurement is a completely different issue and a red herring here.

In my view, there is no alternative. It is easier to supply water from the Shannon than to dig up the whole of Dublin to find out where the leaks are.