The South Galway Flood Relief Committee (SGFRC ) is calling on Minister Boxer Moran (OPW ) and Minister Sean Canney to intervene personally to rescue a flood relief scheme that has been in development for over a decade and is now critically off schedule.
The scheme - designed to protect communities across South Galway and the Gort Lowlands from recurring devastating flooding - has been stalled for over 15 months in an informal, non-statutory engagement with the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS ).
What began as a targeted pre-consultation query has expanded into a rolling environmental review with no fixed end date, pushing public consultation to Q1 2027 at the earliest and construction beyond 2028.
David Murray, Chair of the SGFRC, said this project has been promised to the people of South Galway since the catastrophic flooding of 2015 — itself only the latest in a cycle of floods going back to the 1990s.
“In January 2025 the project team sat down with the National Parks and Wildlife Service for what was described as a helpful, informal meeting. The scope was narrow: get NPWS comfortable with proposed flow control structures on the scheme. No major concerns were raised. Everything highlighted by NPWS as a potential problem area had already been addressed by our environmental consultants. It felt like the beginning of the end of a very long road.
“Eighteen months later, we are still waiting to close out that engagement. We have cooperated fully at every stage. But 15 months trapped in an optional feedback loop, with deadline after deadline missed, is not acceptable. Original surveys are at risk of going out of date. The community is running out of patience,” he said.
Why this matters?
“There is something important to acknowledge at the outset: the project team has not been idle. The volume of work produced since January 2025 – ecological surveys, hydrological modelling, NIS drafting, UTHL shapefiles, botanical assessments, a 34-year inundation analysis – is substantial. Enda Gallagher, Galway County Council and his colleagues are working hard on one of the most environmentally complex flood relief schemes ever attempted in Ireland.
“But hard work and good intentions do not explain away what has happened to this timeline. The original NPWS engagement was originall scoped around a single technical question: are flow controls on the scheme acceptable? That question was answered – they are not being included. Yet the engagement has since blown into a full informal environmental review covering turlough habitat mapping, SAC boundaries, 34 years of inundation modelling, and now, the latest the reformatting of reports deemed too technical for NPWS to follow.
“This is not an NPWS problem. The right people doing the right due diligence on a scheme that will affect European-designated habitats is exactly what the law requires. This is not a statutory requirement (at this stage, but will be later ). This is a process problem. There is no cap on how far this informal engagement can expand. There is no independent arbiter of what is sufficient. Every new NPWS representative brings new questions. And because the engagement is non-statutory, none of it counts as formal consultation – it all has to happen again once planning documents are submitted,” added David Murray.
“How can we move from ‘not having enough infomration’ to ‘having too much technical information and spend 16 months in a non-mandatory part of the process with the cost of project now exceeding €5 million?
The SGFRC has written to all Galway County Councillors requesting:
— Firm publication dates for the Environmental Impact Assessment Report (EIAR )
— Firm commitments from the OPW on review readiness and duration
— A fixed date for public consultation
— A stakeholder meeting with community representatives
— A motion at the next GCC municipal meeting seeking these commitments
“The South Galway Flood Relief Scheme remains the only viable solution for our community. We are not walking away from it. But we will not stay silent about a project that has missed every single major milestone since it began, while families in this community spend every wet autumn watching weather forecasts in dread. That is not acceptable, and it should not be normalised.
“The SGFRC has requested to meet with Minister Moran via Minister Canny but these is not materialised. We demand a meeting to discuss. We will publish an update the moment the NPWS engagement is concluded. Until then – make some noise,” he concluded..
Full details of the delays are documented at: https://southgalwayfloods.wordpress.com/2026/05/31/south-galway-flood-relief-scheme-is-off-the-rails/
