Shannon water for Dublin

The person you are probably thinking of was Brian McDonagh, a Wicklow landholder/businessman, not a Wexford man. He was one of the objectors to Apple’s Athenry data centre, he wanted a data centre built on his own site in Co Wicklow. It didn't get built anywhere in Ireland.

You have to be kidding. First it was pumping tidal water to Dublin, now it's desalination in one of the wettest countries in Europe, at roughly twice the cost of a pipeline. So we'd ignore the largest river in the country, spend far more money, use vastly more energy, and for what exactly?

You'd happily pay double, just out of spite?

There is enough water to go around, that is the key point. This is not about scarcity, it is about distribution and planning. Everyone benefits when the system is strengthened.

You absolutely have a point about the lack of a counterbalance to Dublin, but deliberately starving the country’s largest city of a vital resource like water because you don't like it is not a solution, it is self defeating. A functioning Dublin supports jobs, investment, and services that benefit the entire country.

At some point you also have to put prejudices aside and recognise that Dublin is the economic powerhouse of the country. It is vital to the rest of Ireland. Petty grievances, suddenly dressed up as environmental concerns by posters who never previously showed much interest in environmental issues, should not be what determines national infrastructure.

Dublin financially supports large parts of the country through tax revenue, employment, and investment. If the opposite were to happen and Dublin’s growth and reliability were undermined, the knock on effects for rural Ireland would be severe. This is not Dublin versus the rest of Ireland, it is about ensuring the entire country continues to function and prosper.

You are mixing three separate arguments together here, and the data does not really support them all.

First, on the economics point, data absolutely does exist. The CSO’s latest regional accounts show Dublin is still the single biggest economic centre in the State by a long way. In 2023 Dublin City and County recorded GDP of €248.3 billion, while the South West region, Cork and Kerry combined, was €123.3 billion. The CSO also says 35% of all employed people worked in Dublin, compared with 12% in Cork. Dublin also had total disposable income of €52 billion in 2024, versus €23 billion for the South West region. So the claim that “no data exists” is simply wrong. There is data, and it shows Dublin is the biggest concentration of jobs, output and income in the country.

Now, Cork and Munster are obviously hugely important too. The South West is an economic powerhouse in its own right, especially because of manufacturing and pharma, and it has very high output per person. But that is not the same thing as saying it generates “much of our GNP” in a way that eclipses Dublin. On the latest CSO figures, Dublin remains ahead on total GDP, income and employment.

On the water project, it is simply not accurate to frame it as “Dublin versus the rest”. Uisce Éireann’s own project documents say the scheme is designed to support the Eastern and Midlands region, with capacity for offtakes along the route in Tipperary, Offaly and Westmeath, and to free up existing supplies now serving Dublin so they can be redirected back to communities in Meath, Kildare, Wicklow, Louth and Carlow. Their published case is that it is a regional resilience project, not just a Dublin city tap. Whether you believe that case is another matter, but that is the stated infrastructure logic.

There is also a real supply issue. Uisce Éireann says water demand in the Greater Dublin Area is estimated to be 34% higher by 2044, and that the current system lacks resilience. Their wider strategy is not “build the pipe and forget the rest”, it explicitly includes leakage reduction and network upgrades as well, but they argue those measures alone will not close the gap. The one part of your post that is broadly right is the legal point. In environmental law, what matters is the impact on habitats, water status and compliance with EU and Irish law, not whether objectors are sincere environmentalists or just using the environment as a weapon. Motive is secondary. The actual ecological and legal tests are what matter. Ireland’s EPA’s own State of the Environment report shows only 54% of surface waters were at high or good ecological status in the latest assessment, so environmental scrutiny here is not some invented sideshow.

Yes, the Greater Dublin Area produces roughly 40 percent of GDP and has roughly 40 percent of the population. On the surface that looks like Dublin is simply carrying its own weight. But that is not how national economies or public spending work.

CSO data shows that the Eastern and Midland region generates roughly 60 percent of Ireland’s economic output, the Southern region about 32 percent, and the Northern and Western region about 8 percent. That means a significant proportion of tax generating economic activity is concentrated in the east, particularly around Dublin.

However, government spending is not distributed in proportion to GDP. It is deliberately redistributed across the country through healthcare, education, social protection, agriculture, regional development funding, infrastructure and public sector employment. Regions with lower economic output tend to rely far more heavily on public spending and public sector employment than high productivity areas.

So when people say Dublin supports the rest of the country, they do not mean Dublin is doing it alone. They mean that higher tax generating regions contribute disproportionately to national revenues, which are then spent across the entire country. That is how most modern economies function.

On the second point, the suggestion that supplying the midlands will simply lead to greater Dublin expansion ignores what the Water Supply Project actually says. The project identifies multiple beneficiaries including Meath, Kildare, Offaly, Westmeath, Wicklow and wider eastern growth corridors. These are not Dublin. These are regional towns and counties that currently face constraints on growth because of water capacity. Water infrastructure is not just about Dublin growth. It is about enabling housing, industry and investment across large parts of the country.

There is also a broader point here. Blocking infrastructure to Dublin does not create a second city. That has never worked anywhere. What creates second cities is infrastructure, connectivity, utilities and investment. Water supply is one of the most basic pieces of that puzzle.

If Dublin stalls, Ireland stalls. That is simply the reality of how the Irish economy is structured. And that is not good for Cork, Galway, Limerick or anywhere else. The Shannon project is not Dublin versus the rest of the country. It is national infrastructure that enables growth across multiple regions.