Tree pits, rain gardens, and swales would help absorb rain, to reduce the flow into the sewers when it’s really tipping it down.
Just east of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Golden Lane is a street with no shortage of trees. They line the curving footpaths leading out towards Aungier Street.
But, while they add a nice touch of green, the pits in which they are planted are small. So small in fact that the trees seem almost to have emerged by accident from between the cracks in the pavement.
It’s a public realm that is largely impermeable, said Roy O’Connor, a senior engineer in Dublin City Council, at the South East Area Committee on Monday afternoon.
“Which basically means we have a lot of surface-water runoff whenever there are intense rainfalls,” he said.
At such times, when the rain beats down so hard that the landscape can’t absorb it, without the sponginess of substantial tree pits and the like, that water ends up in the sewer system.
Foul waste from private property and surface water will mix together, O’Connor said. “And they all discharge along the sewer network down as far as Ringsend for treatment.”
It also discharges out into the River Liffey, he said. “It’s got a poor water quality status.”
It’s an issue that is coming up a lot more due to climate change, he said.
The increasing numbers of storms is also a contributing factor, says Paul Johnston, a hydrological engineer in Trinity College Dublin. “Mainly because it gets into the urban wastewater treatment system and overwhelms it.”
In recent years, there have been pockets of interventions around the city to try to deal with struggling sewers and flooding, with rain gardens and rainscapes in Stoneybatter, swales in Ashtown, and permeable tarmac on Francis Street.
Now, the council’s looking at how to soak up the rainwater on Golden Lane using nature-based solutions, O’Connor said at the area meeting, which “are identified as being the best way to sort the problem”.
“It’s trying to catch the rainfall before it goes into the sewer system, so we can basically utilise it in the area where it lands, as opposed carrying it through infrastructure to Ringsend,” he said.
The plan is to have construction on the Golden Lane pilot underway by the end of 2025. The council is also rolling out similar nature-based solutions on Violet Hill near Glasnevin and McAuley Park in Harmonstown.
O’Connor said it is the council’s intention to report back on how Golden Lane fares by 2027.
Golden Lane is a useful place to measure the impact of any interventions because it is a tight urban area with a segregated surface sewer system which discharges directly into the combined foul and surface water inner city sewerage system, he said.
But while councillors welcomed this proposal, they expressed concern that Dublin City Council was being rather unambitious in how only a handful of nature-based solutions to surface water runoff might be in place by the end of the decade.
Dublin City Council’s plan to reduce the surface water runoff on Golden Lane is in the earliest stage, and the vision brought to the area committee by O’Connor is quite nebulous.
When he spoke to local councillors on Monday 9 December, he said the purpose of his presentation was to introduce this project at its “inception stage”.
Golden Lane is only about 500 metres south of the Liffey, which is partly the motivation for the project. It has poor water status, he said.
Nationwide, “over the last two decades, we’ve seen a consistent decline in water quality”. The government’s Water Action Plan of 2024 aims to achieve a good water quality status for the whole country as required under EU and Irish legislation, he said.
Nature-based solutions are the best way to respond, he said.
Among the features that the council is to consider for Golden Lane and neighbouring Whitefriar Street are tree pits, permeable paving and rain gardens, O’Connor said. “Tree pits will be more common in denser urban areas.”
Rain gardens are small patches designed to catch water running off roofs or hard-paved areas.
O’Connor’s presentation also proposed the use of swales – sunken marshes – and porous pavement for car parking spaces, the kind already put in in some parts of the city, he said. “Most recently on Francis Street.”
Starting in January, the council will begin to engage with locals in the Golden Lane area, O’Connor said, and show what they’re looking at. “We’re not trying to presume what interventions we might propose. But we need to guide people’s thoughts and input.”
They would be looking to include in these works the houses and flats owned by Dublin City Council on either side of the junctions at Bride Street and Whitefriar Street, he said.
Then, the plan is to make some changes in real life by the end of 2025, with the results being assessed over two years, he said. “The idea about that is we will then learn how effective what we’ve introduced is, with a mind to its cost and its potential scalability ultimately across much of the inner city.”
Green Party Councillor Carolyn Moore noted that Golden Lane will be joining Violet Hill and McAuley Park in this bid by the council to reduce the pressure on its wastewater treatment system.
But this doesn’t seem terribly ambitious for the council, she said. “It could be 2030 before Dublin is making a really significant contribution to achieving water quality objectives.”
It is a small intervention relative to the size of Dublin city, O’Connor said. “But from our perspective, it is to start building scalability of these kind of projects in the city centre.”
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