Fears over what winter will bring at Lough Funshinagh
A South Roscommon councillor has voiced concern about the impact a wet winter is likely to have on flooding at Lough Funshinagh, where water levels are already some 800 millimetres higher than they were this time last year.
Cllr Laurence Fallon said the toll of the summer rain was still being felt in Ballagh, Rahara, on the shore of Lough Funshinagh.
"It was an extremely wet summer and that has had an impact," said Cllr Fallon, who lives close to the flood-prone lake.
"Given the current situation, we are getting very worried about what things will be like in February, March or April if we have a wet winter."
In a new bid to address the flooding crisis in the area, Roscommon County Council recently advertised for a contractor to carry out an "ecology review and baseline surveys" of Lough Funshinagh and its environs.
The work scheduled to be carried out by the contractor included assessing how "the ecological attributes" of the Lough Funshinagh Special Area of Conservation (SAC) had "changed over time" following increasingly frequent flooding incidents.
The closing date for contractors to apply for the Lough Funshinagh review and surveys was September 7, and the contract was expected to be awarded a week later.
However, Cllr Fallon said he understood there had been no successful tenders for this work.
"I understand there were some expressions of interest but there was no successful tender, which is a disappointment," he said. "This was going to be the first step in hopefully finding a solution."
In 2021, Roscommon County Council and the Office of Public Works (OPW) initiated work on a 2.9km overflow pipe which was being constructed as a flood relief measure from Lough Funshinagh to the Shannon at Lough Ree.
This work was subsequently halted on foot of a High Court challenge brought by the Cork-based Friends of the Irish Environment group.
Cllr Fallon said the flooding in recent years has had a seriously detrimental effect on the ecology of the lake.
"It's frightening to think that families are under threat, and yet we're allowing it to happen under the guise of protecting the environment," he said.
"Anyone who looks at the lake now can only describe it as a dead lake, because the vegetation in and around it is dead, and it's with sadness that I say that. The work that would restore it has been stopped in the name of the environment, which is a total contradiction."
Cllr Fallon said Roscommon County Council, its new CEO Shane Tiernan, and the OPW, remained committed to finding a solution to the Lough Funshinagh crisis but that the situation was becoming increasingly critical.
"It can be clearly established now that this is not going to go away on its own. The lake is consistently two to three metres higher than it should be, so it's not going to rectify itself," he said.
"If an farmer had done individually what's been done to that lake they'd be before a court and they'd be put out of business. Yet it's been allowed to happen because of the inability of the State to find a solution to an environmental problem," he concluded.
The Westmeath Independent contacted Roscommon County Council on this issue, but at the time of writing we had not received a response.