Kildare County Council and the National Roads Authority have proposed an engineering scheme to overcome environmental objections to the planned Kildare by-pass. But it is not clear whether this "solution" will persuade the European Commission to fund it.
Essentially, it is proposed to wrap a 1.5km cutting south of the traffic-plagued town in a plastic membrane to prevent the Curragh Aquifer draining into it. Last March, An Taisce made an official complaint to the Commission in Brussels that the proposed by-pass - and the cutting, in particular - could result in the dewatering of Pollardstown Fen, an important natural habitat north-east of Kildare.
According to Mr Tony Lowes, chairman of An Taisce's natural environment group, the Commission, which would fund 85 per cent of the £68 million by-pass, said the documentation it had submitted was "the most devastating ever seen in support of an environmental complaint".
He said the latest proposal submitted to Duchas, the Heritage Service, for its observations would involve lining the 1.5km cutting with plastic sheeting with the aim of "holding back the water so that it won't bleed from both sides" on to the route of the motorway.
"It's a very complex engineering problem which will take some time to evaluate," Mr Lowes said.
In 1993, he said, the Office of Public Works had drawn attention to the potentially devastating impact of the by-pass cutting on the water-table in the Curragh, including Pollardstown Fen, from where Guinness draws spring water for its Dublin brewery.
However, its strong reservations did not persuade those designing the by-pass to eliminate the cutting. "The only excuse we have heard is that it would protect the National Stud," Mr Lowes said.
The former Kildare county planning officer, Mr Philip Jones, who is now working as a senior inspector with An Bord Pleanala, told the 1993 public inquiry into the by-pass scheme that if it came to a choice, Pollardstown Fen was more deserving of protection.
Mr Lowes said An Taisce was mystified about why the engineers were "going to such lengths to keep the road in a cutting when the simplest and cheapest solution would be allow it to run along the surface". Such a redesign would save the fen 3km away.
Irrespective of the latest waterproofing plan, he said, the engineers still intended to drill dewatering holes along both sides of the proposed cutting. "They were supposed to start monitoring in 1994, but it didn't get under way until April, a month after we made the complaint."
Since the opening of the Newbridge by-pass, Kildare has become a major bottleneck on the main route between Dublin, Cork and Limerick.
