The Santry River in north Dublin tells a timely story of what happens when man-made design bumps up against natural limits. The small river is one of Dublin’s dirtiest. For part of its journey to the sea from its source in Harristown near St Margaret’s, the Santry runs in dark underground pipes.
All along its 13km length it has been forced into straight lines, rushing the flow to Dublin Bay at the back of Bull Island, where it arrives dirtier than legally permissible. If rivers are spirits, the Santry is a hassled and depleted one. Yet it is home to otters, kingfishers, at least one heron and a badger. Life clings on – until it can’t any more. Older residents remember a fishable river when they were children.
The Santry has a champion. John Stack believes the river can become a healthy and beautiful amenity, and it will probably take the rest of his career to get there. The senior executive engineer with Dublin City Council knows the river like the back of his hand. We meet in the aptly named River Cafe in the Raheny Shopping Centre to talk about the project.
Dublin is a city of seven rivers, I once heard him tell an audience. What are they? He starts from the top down: “the Mayne, the Santry, the Tolka, the Liffey, the Camac, the Poddle and the Dodder.” A man beside our table chimes in with the Naniken. Yes that’s one, John agrees, like an arbiter in a pub quiz. The Naniken is mainly underground, glimpsed briefly in St Anne’s Park. If we want to talk about underground rivers though, Dublin has 39 of those, most of them incorporated into the drainage system, he explains.
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City rivers run underneath and around us, earning little attention until the once-in-a-century rainstorms arrive. The problem, as Stack knows from 20 years of studying rainfall data, is that those once-in-a-century events will become far more frequent. “January was a wake-up call,” he says.
Growing up in Castleisland in Kerry, he spent much of his time around rivers. He carried water from a well and holidayed on a family farm in Monaghan, where water was treated as a precious resource.
Stack started working on the Santry with his team eight years ago. He likes his work, and he likes when the work helps people. “I’ve always had a thing for the small guy, and the Santry is a small river.” It was both a problem and an opportunity. It’s one of Dublin’s most polluted rivers but it also has the most open green space around it, much of it in City Council hands.
“My wife’s family grew up around here in Edenmore, and when this project was first launched, one of them texted me and said, ‘I never thought I’d see someone doing something for the rat river.’ It was known as the rat river.”
The Santry has three problems: pollution from a pumping station at the top, its extremely altered course, and urban run-off – the pollution washed in when torrents of rain hit tarmac and concrete in the streets around it. Uisce Éireann is fixing the first problem. Stack’s team’s work will be to fix the other two. They have to build some flood walls to protect properties in Raheny village, but most of the fix will involve using soil, trees, plants and wetlands: restoring the meanders and natural river features, undoing the paving over some sections, removing hard surfaces in estates and relandscaping 60 residential and industrials areas as rain gardens.
We head out to see where the work has started, past McAuley Park and on to Lein Road in Artane, where the green area was until recently a steep embankment of grass. Now it’s an undulating ripple of dips called swales, criss-crossed with low walls built from brown composite planks, dotted with lone silver birch trees. These swales and weirs can hold up to 400,000 litres of water. In small rainstorms the soil will absorb the rain water, so none ends up in the river. For larger downpours, the 400,000 litres can be held and then released to the sewer network and river slowly, over days, rather than hours. This will keep homes safer and water cleaner.
Overall, John Stack estimates the flood protection, renaturalisation of the river, rainscapes and a greenway could come in at a cost of €60 million. Funding ‘needs to be simplified and made more accessible’, he says
“I’m looking forward to the wildflowers coming through,” Stack says. “This ultimately will be densely vegetated and the root zones will create better conditions for water.” Along a curvy path, he’s happy to see children have chalked an ice cream cone in pastel colours. “In the summer last year the kids were playing in the weir and jumping up and down.” Unfortunately litter has also collected in some of the dips, but he hopes that will make it easier to litterpick than if it was blowing around a flat green.
“There are 60 inflows into the river, so I need 60 schemes like this effectively, some bigger some smaller. We literally have to go housing estate by housing estate until we’ve done them all. In the industrial areas, we have to try and convince the management companies in those areas to do the same because there are some very large inflows from those. There’s hardly a blade of grass in any of them,” he says. Householders who pave their gardens are adding to the problem.
As we cross to Harmonstown Road, Stack points out a grass playing pitch that will be retained, but the land on the far end is “really boggy, so my vision is a wetland area there that will drain the runoff from those estates. That’s the nature-based solution there – two more pipes there going into the river, so that’ll be two more pipes gone. So only 56 more left.”
The reaction from residents has been “overwhelmingly positive”, he says. “They didn’t really know what we were talking about, and that was a problem. Now they love it.”
On the bridge, we get a first glimpse of the Santry, a small line of water running as straight as a canal with a mangled scrambler tyre visibly submerged. The historical maps show that the river used to meander into the green space to its left here, and Stack has created beautiful visualisations of an amenity river park that could be created if they nudge the river back into a meandering flow.
“There’s a heron that lives along here,” he says as we look down at what looks like a lifeless stretch. “There is life in this river. Now that we’ve done all this work and we understand what we need to do, I think there’s a lot of hope for this river as well. I just need funding. That’s literally it.” The work could be completed in a few years, he says. “We’ve designers and contractors in sync with each other.”
The City Council has to work with nature in the Santry project rather than carrying out traditional hard engineering, to comply with environmental law and its own Climate Action and Biodiversity plans. The City Development Plan also prohibits development within 10-15 metres of a river. So concrete walls and tanks to hold back the water aren’t an option. The good news is that the nature-based solution is not only more effective, but should also be cheaper.
How much funding does he need and where does the money come from? They estimate the first phase, Raheny to the coast, would cost between €12 and €15 million. So far the work has been funded under the Towns and Cities Investment Fund (previously called the Urban Regeneration and Development Fund). This provides 75 per cent of the money, with the local authority supplying the remainder. Another source may be the Government Infrastructure, Climate and Nature fund. But management of this “seems to have been devolved to several Government departments, making it difficult to know how to access it”, Stack says. The OPW is also a possible source. Overall, he estimates the flood protection, renaturalisation of the river, rainscapes and a greenway could come in at a cost of €60 million. Funding “needs to be simplified and made more accessible”, he says.
His next step will be to present a business case for the planning application, showing the cost efficiency of the idea.
The cost and trauma of damage to homes and businesses and environmental fines loom ahead if the work isn’t done. The Santry is a small river that asks a big question. How does Dublin, as a city of water, adapt for a future of extreme weather?
“It’s not just the Santry,” Stack says. “We’ve to do this for the whole city. The city centre is its own conversation, where we don’t have the luxury of green space like this.” There it will mean “de-paving, taking opportunities where they’re presented … But it is do-able, and we’re ramping up to get it done.”
