Council’s €45,000 seaweed machine is beached

A beach-cleaning seaweed machine, which cost the city €45,000, is in storage because it cannot perform the job it was purchased to do, it has emerged.

The seaweed machine was bought by Galway City Council some years ago in order to clear the city beaches of seaweed.

At the time there was brouhaha about the state of the city beaches which were covered in seaweed. The smell from the washed-up weed and the flies that it attracted at Ballyloughane and Salthill beaches prompted the local authority to purchase the high-tech seaweed clearing machine. It was confirmed that it cost €45,000.

But it emerged this week that the seaweed machine is in storage somewhere because it is not able to clear the city’s beaches of seaweed.

“It hasn’t the capacity to deal with the amount of seaweed at the beaches,” admitted Tom Connell, Director of Services for Environment, at Galway City Council.

City councillor Frank Fahy (FG) was gobsmacked at the revelation.

“Are you telling me that we paid €45,000 for a machine that cannot do its job?”

At the moment the Council clears the weed by transporting it out to sea, a practice that Cllr Fahy said was useless because it would be washed ashore again. He suggested that the City Council use the seaweed as fertiliser on community gardens.

Senior Engineer, Joe Tansey, explained that the Council had been in discussion with seaweed factories to take the seaweed away but they do not use cut seaweed.

He explained that seaweed is useless unless the salt is rinsed out of it because salty seaweed would destroy crops rather than fertilise them.

For more on this story, see this week’s Galway City Tribune