*The Banner Plaza. Photograph: Joe Buckley
AN ESTIMATED €26,000 will be paid on interim waste disposal measures to keep the Banner Plaza operational.
High Court proceedings taken by Friends of the Irish Environment against Uisce Éireann have prohibited Supermac’s from utilising the Clareabbey wastewater treatment plant.
With the matter not before the courts until the beginning of February, Managing Director of Supermac’s Pat McDonagh confirmed to The Clare Echo that they have hired Ennis headquartered environmental and waste management specialists Clare Drains up to safely dispose of their waste at the Plaza until the legal challenge is dealt with.
Since planning for the motorway service station was sought in 2016, in the region of €18m has been spent to get the project to its opening. An additional €26,000 will be spent with Clare Drains between now and February according to McDonagh.
He outlined, “It will cost whatever it costs but it will be in excess of €2,000 per week, we have a spanking new unit which I’m told is in excess of 100,000 and that is on site, it is the most modern one in Ireland at this stage, it activates itself and gives a signal when it is full and then you go along, empty it and bring it back again, it is going to cost a bit but that is only one of the smaller difficulties we were faced with, we can’t allow someone to try just block the road, we have to try get around it, get under it, do whatever”.
Explaining how the Banner Plaza is functioning without access to the Clareabbey Treatment Plant since its opening on Friday, he stated, “We always had planned to have our own treatment plant so the water that is going into the Clareabbey treatment plant is treated water so it is probably better than any treatment plant in the country. It wasn’t going to have any major effect on it, the last judicial review we had Judge Holland said that and he granted us the right to continue. We had a contract with Irish Water and then the objectors came in and took a judicial review, we are challenging that at the moment, the judicial review isn’t directly against us, it is against Irish Water but it is obviously affecting us”.
“We have a fantastic treatment plant there, we also have a unit from Clare Drains that has capacity for over 100,000 litres of wastewater, we will ship to whatever treatment plant has the licence, it’s Clare Drains looking after that and they have licences to transport it to one of the treatment plants in Limerick, that is what we have to do for the moment. The case is adjourned for three months so it is February 3rd that we are back on again”. He added, “The water is treated, the water from the roof is utilised for the toilets etc and the sewerage water is treated and that is transported to the treatment plant in Limerick”.
Flagging one bone of contention with the judicial review system, the business man noted that their objectors are delaying works at no financial costs to themselves but rather the businesses impacted. “The unfortunate thing about these judicial reviews and objectors for environmental reasons is they get free legal aid, they can continue these cases for as long as they wish and it is costing them nothing so something is going to have to change on that area, it is going to stagnate the whole country, any small builder trying to build a house or project if somebody likes this gets involved it could hold up the whole thing for a few years, Banks won’t give out money to builders or support them because they don’t know if it will ever succeed so is going to give money out for a project that they won’t know will succeed”.
