Sir, – The seawater in Dublin Bay at the moment is filthy brown – somewhere between dark chocolate and milk chocolate. None of the local scuba diving clubs have been able to start diving as yet in 2018.
Dublin Port has been dredging, bed-levelling and dumping its waste into Dublin Bay just off the Baily lighthouse almost non-stop since September 2017.
Its current permit does not allow dredging and dumping at this time due to the salmon and elvers run in the Liffey. To get around this it is now dumping with a permit first applied for in 2007.
Every plant, fish, filter-feeder and living thing in Dublin Bay is now coated with a fine silt after the months of dumping. The dump site used is shallow: just six metres to 20 metres, sloping back east into the bay and the wave action empties it almost immediately spreading its contents out over the entire bay.
The current expansion of Dublin Port involves its deepening to 10 metres at the lowest tide to accommodate the largest container ships. Dublin Bay outside the port is much less that 10 metres deep, so to get these huge ships in they are digging out the sea floor for two sea lanes, way into the bay over a length of almost 13km, out to near the Baily lighthouse. When it finally achieves that depth, this will need regular maintenance dredging to keep it all open, as tides and waves will fill it all back in again. The natural port of Dublin would be less than three metres deep, the new one at 10 metres deep will be very unnatural. Dublin Port is being turned into a very unnatural place.
The site where all the material is being dumped is located in the bay, off the Baily lighthouse in Howth, in a Special Area of Conservation, which is designed to protect its reefs and its population of harbour porpoises. The dump site is also inside our Dublin Bay Biosphere.
Where else in the world would a dump site be allowed in such a protected area?
Part of the inner port sea floor is heavily contaminated with mercury and other heavy metals. This is being disturbed and excavated also and must cause some leeching of its contents to the water column.
As a diver, I see the lobsters, crabs and other life walking around with an overcoat of silt on their backs.
When divers land on the sea bed after dumping has been taking place a plume of silt rises into the water and we cannot return to shore on the same line as we came out on due to the silt/dirt we disturb in the water.
On the northside of the bay expensive studies have been done to examine how the silting up of the Blue Lagoon along Sutton, Raheny and Dollymount could be stopped.
It is my view that the dumping of 14 million tons just outside Dollymount into the bay contributes greatly to the silting of the lagoon.
Following the building of the Ringsend sewerage plant the water and life in the bay has been improving year by year.
We now see scallops in Scotsman’s bay, last year for the first time we spotted adult crayfish close to Dalkey Island. Progress all in the right direction, except for Dublin Port dumping 14 million tons of the waste dredging onto Dublin Bay.
David McWilliams’s recent well-researched article in your paper “Move the port and make Dublin one of the great cities” was entirely true.
As the surrounding areas get more and more built up around the port something will have to give and I guess and hope that Dublin Port will be moved to a more suitable location. – Yours, etc,
PEADAR FARRELL,
Diving instructor,
Curragh Sub Aqua Club,
Dublin 5.