This article is from page 8 of the 2012-09-25 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 8 JPG
LABASHEEDA is a village on the Shannon estuary, an area of high environmental sensitivity, yet its people are asked to survive a recession, develop the area and care for the environment without any sewerage scheme.
And despite more than a half a century of promises from different governments and plans and funding being allocated by the second last Minister for the Environment, the plans have been cancelled and the money taken back.
This is of little surprise to the despondent local people, who have spent the last decade working with planners, the county council and government departments in developing the plan for the village.
Among those involved was local school principal, Liam Woulfe.
“I’m convinced that it was never a runner from day one, and the Department of the Environment were merely playing with figures and statistics just to show that a number of projects were being considered, to look good in Europe,” he said.
“They constantly changed the conditions relating to the type of system to be installed, and Clare County Council, in good faith, would have to go back to the drawing board. We were being regularly told that the money was ‘ringfenced’, a term I don’t want ever to hear in use again, it just seems to mean that the funding is never really there in the first place,” he added.
The “ringfenced” money for the Labasheeda and Carrigaholt Scheme has now disappeared and the goalposts have changed again, so much so that the council can no longer apply for a scheme for Labasheeda.
Sean Ward, Senior Engineer with Clare County Council told The Clare People , “The rules governing the 2011 Annual Review did not give us any leeway for re-submission of the Labasheeda element of the scheme.”
“As neither of the two villages (Carrigaholt or Labasheeda) was included in the new WSIP, the budget allocated in 2008 is no longer available. Clare County Council was reim- bursed by the department for the design and other planning costs, which it had incurred up to the time the scheme was dropped from the Water Services Investment Programme (WSIP),” he said.
The engineer was not confident of a resolution to the situation anytime soon.
“Unless and until the scheme can be reconsidered as part of any 2014onwards WSIP, it isn’t possible to say if and when a sewerage scheme can be built in either Carrigaholt or Labasheeda,” he said.