Why the port plan is ‘sprainted’

THE Port of Cork Company wants to build a very large container port at Oyster Bank in Ringaskiddy.

Under new legislation it has been allowed to apply for ‘fast track’ planning permission directly to An Bord Pleanála.

The largest document in the planning application is the crucial environmental impact statement.

In the report of the mammal survey conducted on the proposed site, 124 words are used to describe the fact that otter spraint (ie, droppings) were found at two places along the shoreline.

I admired the fact that whoever discovered the two otter “sprainting sites” managed to report the find, with all the necessary environmental interpretation, expertly and succinctly in just 124 words.

Of course, for a container port, transport considerations are the crucial issue. Otters and their droppings are important, but the main environmental impact of this new port, which is planned to handle more than 500,000 containers per year — will result from the movement of all those containers to and from the port itself.

Imagine my surprise then when the report proceeded to inform me that “there is no railway line serving Ringaskiddy for either passenger or freight services”.

Those 13 words are the sum total allocated to this crucially important matter. Yet the environmental impact of moving every container to and from that port by road is enormous.

That Ringaskiddy is not at a railhead has environmental and strategic implications not just for Cork but for the whole country.

For if the State’s second city loses its ability to receive and send freight by rail, then the whole national rail freight system is fatally weakened.

While our railways do not have the ‘delivery point flexibility’ of roads, and so are currently unfashionable, the sending of heavy freight by rail still has real advantages: it reduces the number of heavy trucks on the roads and it is more fuel-efficient than road freight. This is likely to be much more important in the future as energy costs rise.

With an eye to the environment and to the future, it’s important that Ireland’s rail freight system is not dismantled even further.

For the moment, however, the articulated lorry sweeps all before it … sometimes, frighteningly, all too literally.

Meanwhile, back at Oyster Bank in Ringaskiddy, the word score still stands at: Otter Droppings, 124; Railhead 13.

Is this a record?

Stan Reynolds

The Old Schoolhouse

Toames West

Macroom

Co Cork