Irish Water has scrapped Dublin City Council’s planned redevelopment of the State’s largest sewage works which included a 9km pipe into the Irish Sea.

The upgrade and expansion of the Ringsend waste-water treatment plant would have cost €340 million, the utility said, an outlay which it could not justify.

Irish Water said the necessary works to the plant, which is inadequately sized and does not meet EU standards, would be carried out at half that cost and the underwater pipe would not be built.

Dublin City Council had been planning the expansion of the plant since it began operations in 2003, and secured planning permission in 2012 for the work, including construction of the 9km pipe to bring treated waste-water outside Dublin Bay. The €270 million job was due to begin this year.



Risk-assessment

Irish Water took over responsibilty of waste-water services from the council last January, and undertook a risk-assessment of the scheme which showed it was likely to cost some €340 million to develop.

“That would have constituted our entire capital budget for one year to built one pipe for one area. To commit all the money to one plant would have put us in a desperate situation,” an Irish Water spokesman said.

He said new technologies have emerged which would allow the upgrade of the plant to meet EU standards and expand the facility to deal with the equivalent of 450,000 people’s waste – the expansion as planned by the council – within a budget of €170 million. Of that some €70 million would be spent on expansion and some €100 million retrofitting tanks.

Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan welcomed what he said was a “strategic national decision” by Irish Water.

The council said the decision was a matter for Irish Water.