THE National Lottery has called time on the "chime in the slime". The six ton £250,000 Countdown 2000 Millennium Timer, to give its proper title, will not be returning to the River Liffey at O'Connell Bridge, Dublin.
The underwater clock was removed at the end of August to make way for the annual Liffey Swim and consultants used this opportunity to try to solve the visibility problems that had clouded the gadget since it was installed last spring. People complained they could not read the green digits through the murky waters of the river.
Yesterday the Lottery admitted Anna Livia had won. The cost of solving the technical difficulties associated with the timer's visibility would be prohibitive, it conceded.
In other words, there was no point in throwing more good money after that already spent on the project.
The nine digit timer, which floated just beneath the surface of the river, began counting down the 119 million seconds to the start of the 21st century shortly after 11.15 p.m. on March 15th. About 10,000 people came to see it being switched on by the Minister for Finance, Mr Quinn. The event, shown live on the Late Late Show, was accompanied by a spectacular fireworks display.
But three days later the clock was removed to make way for a boat race. It was installed again after Easter, but was the object of constant complaints from disappointed passers by.
Designed by the architects Grainne Hassett and Vincent Ducatez, the neon timer was the winning entry in a design competition sponsored by the Lottery.
The postcard machine on O'Connell Bridge, which prints out the number of seconds left to the end of the millennium, will be moved to another city centre location soon, according to the National Lottery. More than: 86,000 postcards at 20p each have been sold to date.