A MONUMENTAL clock up or just time out for repairs? After less than a year submerged in the Liffey, the £250,000 National Lottery clock counting the seconds to the year 2000 has gone, possibly for good.
The clock has been in dry dock since the Liffey Swim 10 days ago. Now consultants and engineers are puzzling over the difficulties of making the contraption visible to the passing public. Since its underwater installation earlier this year near O'Connell Bridge, people have complained that they cannot read the digits.
The brainstorming will take about two weeks with another two weeks for the decision makers to decide on the clock's future. In the meantime, the clock will stay out of the water and there is speculation that the Lottery is already planning to quietly scrap the troublesome timepiece.
The National Lottery spokeswoman, more used to dealing with good news stories, said the removal of the clock for the Liffey Swim provided "an opportunity to examine the state of it, particularly the problem with visibility which was raised by the public".
The consultants, engineering firm P.H. McCarthy and Partners, would come back with a "range of options", she said. One of these may be to hang the clock on a building where only the traffic pollution will fog the digits. Another option might be to float the clock above water level or cover it with a container filled with clean water.
When the clock was switched con last March it was hailed as a novel tourist attraction. It seems that no one expected the Liffey to coat it with quite so much slime. The postcard machine on O'Connell Bridge, printing the number of seconds left to the end of the millennium, is still in place and will remain there, the Lottery spokeswoman said.
