Sir, - In the interests of properly informing your readers, I feel it necessary to respond to some of the content of your Editorial of March 25th concerning the recent Supreme Court judgement on Galway Corporation's proposal to locate a waste water treatment plant on Mutton Island, Galway. In the Editorial you claimed that the public authorities imposed an environmental straitjacket on the decision to locate the treatment works on Mutton Island, that modern engineering would have allowed for an underground solution and that a cavalier approach was taken with regard to public finances and the securing of EU co-financing.
I would like to remind your readers that the Mutton Island site was selected primarily on environmental grounds. It is seriously misleading to suggest that the proposal is in some way an inferior one environmentally. In particular, the discharge of treated effluent to deep water beyond Mutton island is environmentally much preferable to a discharge to shallow water in the inner Galway Bay, as was proposed for the main alternative site.
Other concerns in relation to the impact on birds were fully examined by the National Parks and Wildlife Service which concluded that a treatment plant on Mutton island would have no significant detrimental impact on birds within the inner Galway Bay Special Protection Area. Other concerns about the impact of sediment movement on beaches were fully examined and it was shown that sediment movement will not be a major environmental issue. Indeed, the most likely effect of the causeway will be a gradual build-up of sandy beaches on the Salthill side.
At the request of the previous Minister for the Environment, Mr Brendan Howlin TD, Galway Corporation and its consultants examined the possibility of an underground facility on Mutton Island. There were serious concerns about the safety of personnel in both the construction and operation of the plant in the absence of a causeway. The impact locally of blasting out underground chambers and excavating rock would be immense. Finally, the proposals would have imposed substantially higher operating costs which would have had to be met by the people of Galway. In short, the proposal to site the treatment plant underground on Mutton Island without land access was neither technically nor economically feasible.
The current proposal is the most cost-effective solution for Galway's waste water treatment problems. This point was not disputed by the independent consultants engaged by the EU Commission to evaluate the project. The current proposal does not represent a cavalier attitude to public finances, though pursuing a high-cost, technically unproven underground solution as suggested in your Editorial certainly would have. In the end the Mutton Island proposal, which has been seriously delayed as a result of objections, will go ahead. Throughout this difficult period it has had the consistent support of the vast majority of the public representatives in Galway, it has been through the planning and EIA process and it has been vindicated in the courts. - Yours, etc., Robert Molloy, Minister of State, Dept of the Environment and Local Government,
Custom House,
Dublin 1.