Uisce Éireann yet to deal with 20-year-old hoarding on Cork quay

“It’s a terrible eyesore when you’re coming into the city, but if they haven’t fixed it in the past 20 years, I would have no confidence they will in the next 20,” Independent city councillor Kieran McCarthy said. 

Hoarding remains in position at Penrose Quay/ Horgan's Quay Cork City 21 years after the completion of the Cork Main Drainage Scheme. Picture: Larry Cummins

Uisce Éireann has refused to say when it will address a two-decades-old eyesore blighting a historic Cork city quay and main approach road, despite saying five years ago it was investigating the issue.

Asked repeatedly over the past month by the Irish Examiner, the State water utility company has declined to say when precisely it intends to resolve a relic of the Cork main drainage scheme which has left ugly hoarding on Penrose Quay since the mid-noughties.

The €300m main drainage project was designed to ensure that Cork city’s sewage system complied with the EU Wastewater Directive at a time when some 13 tonnes of raw sewage were every day being discharged into the River Lee.

After years on the drawing board, work began in 1998 on what was then the largest engineering project in the State, and it was completed in late 2004.

Hoarding remains in position at Penrose Quay/ Horgan's Quay Cork City 21 years after the completion of the Cork Main Drainage Scheme. Picture: Larry Cummins

The massive infrastructure programme involved the laying of 38km of interceptor sewers, including new connections to all premises on the city’s central island, along with some 39km of rising mains.

Ten pumping stations were constructed, and a 2.7km main trunk sewer was laid linking Kennedy Quay with a pumping station at Atlantic Pond.

The scheme transformed the water quality of the river, but steel girders were left sticking out over a siphon on Penrose Quay, and a few years after the scheme was completed, hoarding was erected around the device and has remained in place ever since.

The hoarding, which features Crawford Art Gallery print displays of historic Cork paintings, surrounds the access shaft to a large wastewater siphon, which carries sewage from the city’s northside beneath the river and onward to a large pumping station, east of the Atlantic Pond.

Hoarding remains in position at Penrose Quay/ Horgan's Quay Cork City 21 years after the completion of the Cork Main Drainage Scheme. Picture: Larry Cummins

Five years ago, Independent city councillor Kieran McCarthy was told by the then Irish Water that during periods of high flow, the siphon and its access chamber become “prone to venting”, when turbulence forces the release of “entrained air” in the sewage flow, and that people must be kept back from this venting area.

“The issues causing the venting are complex and are currently being assessed by Irish Water,” he was told.

In October 2020, Irish Water issued a draft report on the problem, but following “preliminary data collection, a workshop and further assessment”, the report was revised and reissued the following May with a recommendation to carry out further investigative works and identify a solution.

That work was ongoing and there was no timeline, Mr McCarthy was told in 2021.

When asked on September 10 of this year for an update, Uisce Éireann replied on September 22 that it was “currently undertaking a range of investigative works on the wastewater infrastructure … to help identify the most appropriate long-term solution.

Asked precisely when – five years after the last update – those investigations into a 20-year-old issue would be completed, the company replied: “At this stage, we have nothing further to add”.

This week, Mr McCarthy said it was his suspicion that nobody had looked at the issue in the past five years.

“It’s a terrible eyesore when you’re coming into the city, but if they haven’t fixed it in the past 20 years, I would have no confidence they will in the next 20,” he said.