The tourist brochures are unlikely to mention it and you won't find it in promotional films about Cork, but every day 13 million gallons of raw sewage and polluted water pour into the Lee river. Last week the European Commission turned its attention to estuarine water quality and criticised the Government for not putting tertiary waste treatment in place in Cork and Dublin.
But generations of Cork people have seen and smelt their lovely Lee as it meandered in two channels through the heart of the city.
It's not just on tertiary treatment that Cork falls short. In fact, the city has no sewage treatment at all. Of the three stages of treatment, the tertiary removes dangerous phosphates and nitrates and other nasties from sewage, before it is released to the environment.
Ireland is playing catch-up on treating sewage, but there are hopeful signs. At a cost of £200 million Cork is being dug up, with the promise that the main drainage scheme will restore the Lee.
All direct sewage dumping into the river will end and make it an amenity to be enjoyed by all. If the promise is kept, Corkonians agree the inconvenience will have been well worthwhile.
Curiously, the "name and shame" report issued by the EU Environment Commissioner, Ms Margot Wallstrom, left some of the local authority officials involved in the mammoth Cork scheme wondering if the EU had got it right.
The EU Wastewater Directive was adopted a decade ago. It was agreed that by 1999 all towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants and no treatment plant would build a primary sewage collection and treatment system and that by the end of last year any town of more than 15,000 would have a secondary system in place, including biological treatment of the waste matter.
There was a further stipulation. EU members were to identify sensitive areas within their jurisdiction where stringent or tertiary treatment, capable of removing nitrogen, phosphorus and/or pathogenic microbes, would be provided.
Cork claims its £200 million scheme meets the EU requirement, although the completion date will be 2003. It says tertiary treatment is not needed because the Government did not designate the Lough Mahon estuary as a sensitive area.
Ms Wallstrom took a view on this, saying it amounted to a cop-out. The report The reason for the tertiary treatment was that nitrogen and phosphate make water nutrient-rich, and eutrophication follows. This is the process whereby certain planktons and algae are favoured by the conditions which result in a "bloom" sucking oxygen from the water at the expense of other plant and life forms.
The Commission found Dublin and Cork were two of the under-designated areas needing tertiary treatment if the coastal waters beside the two cities were to be protected against eutrophication.
Unhappily, it further found that 37 large cities throughout the EU are still discharging untreated waste water into the environment, and that some countries, France and Germany, notably, are slow even to supply information to the EU on the issue.
After two public inquiries the Cork Main Drainage Scheme is now halfway there. The design allows for tertiary treatment to be added on once the secondary system is up and running.
Put simply, all of Cork's domestic sewage and industrial effluent will be gathered via a network of huge sewers, brought to Kennedy Quay and then to the Marina area at Atlantic Pond where it will be pumped to pipes at Lough Mahon.
At the Lough Mahon foreshore, the pipes will disappear under the estuary and the shipping lanes, to emerge again at the Carrigrennan headland in the harbour where the treatment plant will be built.
Solid matter will be converted into fertiliser pellets, and the treated water will be pumped into the sea. Between domestic and industrial waste, the plant will process the waste from a population equivalent to 300,000.
It is a huge undertaking, says Mr Denis Duggan, project engineer, but it is on target to be completed by the end of 2003. After that the Lee could be lovely again.