Uisce Éireann under fire over stalling of planned Cork housing projects

CORK County Council’s chief executive has said that the stalling of more than half of approximately 8,000 planning approvals in 2022 and 2023 for housing units in the county is largely down to Uisce Éireann.

Valerie O’Sullivan was speaking after a letter from Uisce Éireann, relating to a stalled development of 10 housing units in Carraig na bhFear, was raised by Cobh electoral area Fine Gael councillor Sinéad Sheppard during a meeting of the council.

According to Ms Sheppard, the response from Uisce Éireann suggested that Carraig na bhFear was at number 12 in a list of priority areas submitted by Cork County Council to the utility in 2019.

In the letter from Uisce Éireann, the utility’s local authority engagement director, John Dempsey, wrote that schemes ranked from one to seven in the candidate list in Cork were being progressed at present, and that “Cork County Council would have an opportunity to reprioritise the Carraig na bhFear site relative to others on the list under the next Capital Investment Plan 2025-9”.

This prompted the Fine Gael councillor to ask how Carraig na bhFear’s bid for a wastewater treatment plant could progress up the list.

She added that she was aware that Castlemartyr in East Cork had been reprioritised due to a ‘matter of urgency’.

“What do we need to do as elected representatives in order to move Carraig na bhFear up the list?” Ms Sheppard asked.

“We have a beautiful village that’s extremely close to the city, and yet we’re basically telling people up there you cannot build a house if you’ve grown up in Carraig na bhFear and you want to raise your family close to your own family — that can’t happen because no houses can be built.”

This prompted a lively debate involving a number of councillors, and they were all extremely exercised by what they described as the failures of Uisce Éireann.

List of settlements 

According to council chief executive Valerie O’Sullivan, the authority had submitted a list of 35 settlements to Uisce Éireann in 2019 and Carraig na bhFear was at number 12.

“To me, that’s not an excuse,” said Ms O’Sullivan. “They focused on seven, five years ago in 2019, 7/35, that’s 20%, one-fifth in five years.

“Zero per cent of those [water infrastructure projects] have gone to planning.”

Ms O’Sullivan put the Carraig na bhFear issue in context by outlining the broader picture in which the authority had granted 8,000 planning permissions for housing units in the county during 2022 and 2023, but said that only 3,500 of these had been completed or gone to market.

“Now there are gaps, therefore, between the planning system which is working and the completions and, in no small way, can that gap be accounted for by the fact that water infrastructure is not in place — that’s a fact.

“We have done an exercise that demonstrates that, through the good offices of the members in adapting the County Development Plan, the current County Development Plan has sufficient land zoned in this cycle of the development plan to absorb an increase in targets.

“That doesn’t mean they will be delivered either, because there is a deficit in water and wastewater treatment.”

Response 

In a response to a query from The Echo relating to Ms O’Sullivan’s remarks, an Uisce Éieann spokesperson said the utility had invested heavily in the upgrade of the wastewater treatment plants in Cork since 2014 and had plans to continue this investment through current and subsequent investment plans.

“We are committed to supporting housing development and we would encourage any developers to contact Uisce Éireann with a pre-connection enquiry to enable assessment of their development in relation to water services capacity,” said the spokesperson.

The spokesperson added that the ranking of Carraig na bhFear at number 12 was confirmed by Cork County Council when local authorities were asked to review the ranking of candidate settlements in their areas.