Heavily congested Cork town has no working air pollution monitor

Cork County councillor Audrey Buckley claimed it hasn’t been transmitting data since October 5, 2023

Heavy traffic on the main street in Carrigaline in 2018. One councillor said: 'All you have to do is walk around Carrigaline and you can feel the heavy air from sitting traffic.' File picture: Dan Linehan

Cork County Council officials have admitted that a pollution monitor in the largest town in the region hasn’t been working for more than a year.

The news has sparked anger among local representatives in Carrigaline, which is one of the biggest commuter towns in the country, and which suffers from heavy traffic congestion at peak times resulting in increased emissions from vehicles.

Fianna Fáil councillor Audrey Buckley described the admission as “embarrassing” for the council, while others questioned how officials can claim the town's air quality is good when there’s no data to back it up.

Councillors said they initially heard the pollution monitor was out of action during a recent meeting they attended with CHASE, the group battling plans by Indaver to build a waste incinerator in nearby Ringaskiddy.

Officials said the monitor stopped working last year, but Ms Buckley claimed it hadn’t been transmitting data since October 5, 2023.

Officials said there is only one air monitor working in the municipal district, which is in Ringaskiddy. It's maintained by the Port of Cork and monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Officials said that up until 2024 there was a monitor in the amenity park in Carrigaline, but its system "unfortunately reached end of life". A business case for its replacement "has been approved", and it's hoped a new one will be operational early next year, officials said.

The news came to light after Fianna Fáil's Patrick Donovan sought a breakdown of results from the Carrigaline monitor for the past five years. He didn’t receive them. He said this worried him given the extremely high volume of traffic locally.

"All you have to do is walk around Carrigaline and you can feel the heavy air from sitting traffic. This is having a massive impact on local residents, and it’s not being monitored by the council or the EPA as the monitor is broken,” he said.

I remember discussing with someone who professionally cleans windows and he said he had not seen dirt as bad on the windows in Carrigaline since pre the smoky coal ban in Dublin in the early 90s. 

"Regardless of how young or old our population is, we deserve to know what's in the air we are breathing. It's crazy there is no information,” Mr Donovan said.

Fine Gael's Una McCarthy questioned how councillors could be told by their officials that air quality in the Carrigaline area is ‘good’ when there hasn’t been data coming from the defunct monitor for a considerable time.

Her party colleague Jack White said last August “noxious smells” were emanating from the Carrigaline sewage treatment plant and if the monitor was in place and working this would have shown up on data.