Cork County Council has so far spent €43m on unused 'superdump' site outside city

Cork County Council has spent nearly €43m in the last two-and-a-half decades on an unused landfill at Bottlehill, documentation shows.

The landfill at Bottlehill, close to the main Cork to Limerick road and around 10km from Mallow, was chosen as the location for a superdump after the local authority had also looked at sites in Grenagh and Watergrasshill.

Bought by the council in the early 2000s, the Bottlehill site was to take in 217,000 tonnes of waste per year over a 20-year lifespan.

However, council management announced in 2009 after five years of construction that it had become “commercially unviable” to open it. 

This was due in part to other waste disposal facilities opening in other parts of the country that were charging considerably less than the Cork facility would have had to charge to recoup the costs of buying and developing the site.

The planned superdump has thus never been used, but has acquired costs for maintaining and securing the site since its purchase, as well as the repayment of loans taken out to buy the site, figures released to The Echo by the council show.

The council has paid back €37.65m in loans associated with Bottlehill, which a spokesperson said were used in part to pay the site acquisition cost of €14.66m.

In total, €42.15m has been paid back in loans, including interest and principal, from the time Cork County Council acquired the site to the end of December 2025. Further costs include €222,280 for maintenance of the unused site, €92,341 for security there, and €479,050 listed as “other costs” up to the end of December.

This brings the total spent by the council on the site to just under €43m, almost three times the cost of acquiring the site — meaning that more than €28m, or 66% of the total costs, are for things other than the site purchase.

There have been calls among councillors for the site to be sold or leased to allow some money, if not the total spent, to be recouped.