After years of being overloaded, overflowing and in breach of water quality regulations, Ireland’s largest wastewater treatment plant has finally been given a clean bill of health.
The Ringsend facility in Dublin which handles 40 per cent of all the country’s flushed toilets, showers and sink water, has successfully undergone a €550 million makeover.
The expansion and upgrade means it can now handle wastewater from the equivalent of 2.4 million people, an increase from the 1.6 million it was designed for.
However, Uisce Éireann said growth in the Dublin region meant the plant’s headroom remained limited and the planned new Greater Dublin Drainage project (GDD) which will serve 500,000 people in north Co Dublin was essential.
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At the time the Ringsend project began in 2018, the plant was already having to serve the equivalent of 1.9 million people.
That figure rose steadily so that today it is serving 2.1 million people.
Expanding its capacity to 2.4 million will allow for new home building, population growth and economic expansion in the Dublin region – but only for so long.
“Ringsend is going to run out of capacity,” said Uisce Éireann chief executive Niall Gleeson on Wednesday.
“We need to get GDD delivered as quickly as possible.”
The project received planning permission in 2019 but was held up in legal challenges until last December.
The first contracts for works on the site in Clonshaugh went out to tender in the last fortnight.
Despite the completion of the Ringsend works, Ireland still has a case to answer in the European Court of Justice for multiple breaches of the urban wastewater treatment directive.
Ringsend was among the areas cited where there were either no wastewater treatment facilities or overloaded facilities that meant raw or inadequately treated sewage was flowing into rivers and coastal waters.
Most of those areas now have facilities and upgrades but there are still works outstanding in some.
“There were 50 sites and 35 of those are completed and there are works under way in another six so we still have some challenges,” said Maria O’Dwyer, Uisce Éireann’s director of infrastructure delivery.
One area is Kilkee in Co Clare where residents long campaigned for a treatment plant but where there is now opposition to the planned facility.
The location of the plant near a local beauty spot has caused upset and people have also questioned why it will provide only primary treatment instead of the more thorough secondary or tertiary treatment.
O’Dwyer said the decision to go with a primary treatment plant was based on the size of the population. On the location, she said she understood people didn’t always like the look of a wastewater plant but the reality was the facility was badly needed.
