4 Comments

An excellent piece which clearly articulates some of the concerns that so many Corkonians share regarding the brutal and short sighted flood relief plans put forward by the OPW and the respective Authorities. People need to be held to account.

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Raise the issue of Morrison’s Island with Cork City Council and they’ll pass the buck to the OPW. Raise the issue with the OPW and they’ll tell you how Cork City Council voted on it. It’s infuriating.

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There is another serious problem in Fermoy where the storm water is connected to the sewerage and after 1 hour of rain the pumps are turned on and raw sewerage is pumped direct to river because there is no storage yet there is plenty of land between the town and the treatment plant

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Really good read, thanks Ellie.

Another thing that isn’t at all considered by the OPW/those with responsibility for flood defence infrastructure: rivers themselves don’t have an innate nutritional value. If anything, water by itself carries nutrients away. This can happen in the human body when we drink too much water and it happens in the wider ecosystem too.

It’s actually possible to track nutrients found in woodlands and wetlands to the ocean, brought in by salmon, trout, eels and other fish that use rivers to spawn. Several studies have been done on this process in the Pacific Northwest, a temperate rainforest biome not functionally dissimilar to Ireland’s.

Sterilising rivers, treating them as drains rather than veins, will have far reaching and long lasting consequences.

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