‘I was right about lake sewage!’

Duncan claims vindication on five-year claim of sewage in Lough Ennell

Eilís Ryan

A claim that raw sewage has been flowing into Lough Ennell for around the last five years has been made this week by Cllr Andrew Duncan.

“Lough Ennell is, in my opinion, significantly polluted – in my opinion, significantly caused by the wastewater treatment plant – which is the third time in my lifetime that Lough Ennell has had a serious pollution incident directly related to the wastewater treatment plant.”

An email from Irish Water circulated to county councillors last week confirmed that a problem had been identified with the operation of stormwater screens at the Mullingar Wastewater Treatment Plant.

It was a form of vindication for Cllr Duncan, who has been claiming for several years that there is contamination in the lake, and in the River Brosna, which feeds into it, and that the contamination has been coming from the treatment plant.

Cllr Duncan made his claim at the April meeting of the Municipal District of Mullingar Kinnegad, where he spoke of his hope of seeing the results of analysis carried out on the waters of the river Brosna and on examination of the Mullingar waste water treatment plant.

The measures had been agreed at a recent meeting called by Cllr Duncan, specifically on his concerns over the waste water treatment plant between himself, officials from Uisce Éireann and officials from Westmeath County Council, a meeting which he found to have been “very constructive”, particularly due to the input of Ambrose Clarke, from the council, and Padraig Joyce from Irish Water.

“I have to say walking away from that meeting was the first time I felt, in the five years that I’ve been raising this, that I had finally people in the room who were listening and taking note – and I was proved right when I got a phone call two days later from Pádraig Joyce of Irish Water who had gone down to examine the plant, walked in and found a very significant problem.

“That’s the reality,” Cllr Duncan said.

Stating that he wanted to make his colleagues aware of what was happening, Cllr Duncan said that raw sewage was being discharged into the system for “many, many years” due to a flaw in the treatment plant operating itself.

“That’s the facts,” he said, stating that now that the problem has been identified and Irish Water has put its hand up, the onus was on the county council to do everything in its power to preserve the quality of the water both upstream and downstream of the plant.

Cllr Duncan added that the plant is now 16 years in operation, and will need to be upgraded soon. It will, he added, be going back into the hands of Irish Water in four years’ time when the contract comes to an end.

Cllr Duncan was critical of the bureaucracy that had prevented him getting an answer for so long – but had the height of praise for Mr Joyce: “It’s easy to go on and say that Irish Water is a faceless, useless, bureaucratic organisation. And then you meet individuals like Padraig Joyce, and you see people that are absolutely brilliant,” he said.

He added that he was “a little bit disappointed” that he had not been taken a bit more seriously sooner: “It took five years to get there, but there’s no blame that can be attached to the current people in the room there. And I have to credit Ambrose Clarke [Westmeath County Council] in particular, because if Ambrose Clarke wasn’t on the case, and Padraig Joyce wasn’t on the case, we wouldn’t have got to where we are. We’re in a situation now where we’ve identified the problem.”

Cllr Duncan said, however, he wasn’t sure the full extent of the problem had been identified, and he urged Westmeath County Council to up its monitoring of the water.

“Every time we had heavy rainfall, raw sewage was floating down that river into the lake. That’s been going on for a long time. And now we have to go and mitigate that,” he said.

Director of services, Deirdre Reilly, said the results that have been emerging were “concerning”, but that the council’s environment officer Ambrose Clarke, is keen to work with Uisce Éireann to come up with a solution.