Green Party councillor, Deirdre de Burca has welcomed news of a planning application that has recently been made to Wicklow County Council by a private individual for a Sewage Treatment Plant at Ballyraine Lower, Arklow. The planning application was advertised in a national newspaper and specified that the proposed plant would cater for a population equivalent of 45,000 people.

De Burca says that while there are many unanswered questions about the planning application, she broadly welcomes it. She claims that it offers an opportunity to break the deadlock that surrounds the council’s long-standing selected site for the treatment plant at Seabank, Arklow.

“People in Arklow are quite desperate about the prospect of ever getting a proper sewage treatment plant for the town” says de Burca. “The Seabank site which was originally selected by the council got bogged down in legal difficulties. We have seen no movement on delivering the sewage treatment plant over the past ten years and have had to put up with raw sewage floating down the Avoca River into Arklow Bay”.

De Burca says that Wicklow County Council appeared to adopt a “head in the sand” approach to insisting that the only suitable site for the sewage treatment plant was st Seabank. “Since I was elected to the council in 1999 I have consistently asked council officials to look at other possible sites in the town because of the legal problems which surrounded the Seabank site” she says. “I brought a local Arklow group in to meet the County Manager, Eddie Sheehy when he first took up the job in 2003. We asked him would he look at alternative sites for the treatment plant in order to be able to move the treatment plant forward. However, he refused and said that he fully supported the site selection carried out by his officials. In the four years that have passed since that meeting we have seen no progress on the Arklow Sewage Plant.”

The Green Party has called on Wicklow County Council to process the new planning application for the sewage treatment plant as quickly as possible. She has also called on the Chairman of Wicklow County Council to put the item on the agenda of the next council meeting to allow councillors to question officials about all aspects of the planning application.