Shannon water for Dublin

Jaysus, look at the sub-head:

"WHICH is preferrable; the restoration of a world-famous fishery in Limerick or spending billions of taxpayers money diverting polluted water to the citizens of Dublin?"

It sets it up as “world famous fishery in Limerick” versus “diverting polluted water to Dublin”, like it’s some kind of moral showdown. That’s deliberately inflammatory language. It’s designed to get people angry, not to have an honest discussion. It also completely ignores the fact that this isn’t just about Dublin. The supply is for the wider Greater Dublin Area and surrounding counties in the east. It underpins water security for well over a million people and a massive chunk of the country’s economy.

You can argue about cost, environmental safeguards or alternatives. Fair enough. But framing it as Limerick versus Dublin and pretending only “Dublin citizens” benefit is disingenuous and excludes every other county that would receive water. It shuts down proper debate before it even starts.

I read the history of the area before I commented.

The salmon are gone now but the ecology of the area could be improved by reducing the water in the canal and increasing it in the river. That has nothing to do with the pipeline or the citizens of Dublin, it's a local problem. The article is pure bait to promote regional tensions and people like you are jumping on it.

Wasn't it originally part of this plan that a large reservoir was to be created on a bog in Kildare Offaly somewhere? You would think filling such a reservoir during high rates of flow in Winter would somewhat alleviate the problem of direct abstraction from the river at times of low flow. What happened to that plan? The way things are going climatically we may need more reservoir capacity in the future anyway.

Just to be clear, I'm not even against this, I just think that the locals needs to be dealt with in an honest way and not have their concerns dismissed in a patronising manner.

We see people all over the country who would benefit directly from infrastructure projects (Metro North, Bus Connects, etc.) and yet they still oppose them so it's not surprising when you have people who will see no direct benefit from a project but fear that they may be negatively impacted by the project, some of them are likely to oppose it.

It looks at drought periods in terms of the level but it doesn't seem to adjust the extraction flowrate to account for the fact that the extraction rate will presumably increase during drought periods?

Because you need a river to feed a reservoir, and they can't extract any more from the Liffey.

There will be new reservoirs built as part of the Shannon water scheme. These will be filled in the winter. Talk of running the Shannon dry in summer to feed Dublin is idiotic nonsense

Does anyone have details of what volume of new reservoirs are being built? Is it a 1 day / week / month worth of water?

The bad projects get the news. The good projects go by silently. It would be foolish to point to two or three projects and claim that the state can’t build anything in a reasonable way.

Both Revenue and the Passport Office have completely modernised, introduced efficient processes and complex IT systems that are far better than many countries. Luas Cross City was built on time and within 4% of its budget. The Courts of Criminal Justice in Dublin, Terminal 2 and the North Runway in Dublin airport and the Ringsend WWTP upgrade project were all on budget and on schedule. Most of the motorway projects in the 90s were the same after the learning of the first few.If we waved our hands and worried about infrastructure projects possibly being late, we’d never build anything.

Thanks. In the previous doc you shared, the abstraction rate is down as "330Mld" - I presume that's 330 million litres per day?

If that's the case, then a 75 million litre reservoir is only ~6h worth of pumping making it more of a buffer tank than a reservoir