Council pushes forward with transformation of Balleally Landfill into Rogerstown Park

Fingal County Council continues to make progress on transforming the old Balleally Landfill into Rogerstown Park, a council engineer told members of the council’s marine and coastal management committee recently.

In a presentation, David Byrne, senior executive engineer in the environment department, detailed the steps the council has taken over the years, to get to the point where there is a park on this 124 acre stretch, near Lusk.

It’s open Saturdays from 9am and 4pm for strolls by pedestrians and pets. For the other six days, it remains closed.

At the committee meeting on 20 March, Byrne talked about what still needs to be done to complete the works, finish the park, and get it open more days each week.

The new park is built on one of the oldest and largest landfills in the country, and the main dumping spot for Dublin for over four decades, before it closed down in 2012.

There’s a liner underneath, and the top is covered over. Gas produced from decomposition of the waste inside is used to generate electricity.

The council and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been continuously monitoring the site – to pass a slew of environmental metrics, to prove the land is safe, and any harmful byproducts are contained.

At the meeting, Byrne went through the results. He said, “It’s going very well at the moment.”

He also talked about plans to add to the amount of electricity generated on the site by putting in solar panels.

There’s still a lot to do before the park can be opened to the public on more than just Saturdays, council officials said.

Even opening it on Sundays is tricky because the council doesn’t have a park ranger to cover that day, but they’re working on it, said senior parks superintendent Kevin Halpenny.

History of the site

There are actually two landfills on this site in North Dublin, which is being made into a park.

The site first became one of Dublin’s biggest dumping grounds in 1971, and the landfill quickly became the destination for much of the trash from around Dublin, and remained so for over four decades.

But at that time, the EPA didn’t exist, and neither did monitoring for environmental standards or a barrier between the trash and the ground. The EPA was founded in Ireland in 1992, and that came with new standards for protecting the natural world.

As environmental standards heightened, a new landfill was built on top of the previous one. The new landfill was much more secure – with protective barriers, and mechanisms to catch harmful emissions before they seeped out into the surrounding environment.

That operated for another two decades, and then in 2012, that landfill was capped too.

Since then, the land has been left to lie mostly vacant, to make sure chemical byproducts produced as the trash breaks down stay contained, and don’t leak out and affect the health of the environment around it and those in its vicinity.

There’s gases like methane, and then there’s leachates – toxic liquids. The newer part of the landfill was built with this in mind. It’s not only sealed, to prevent it leaking out into the soil, but they created a mechanism to catch the leachate.

At this point, Byrne said, “the landfill generates approximately 44,000 liters of leachate.” That volume has been going down over the years, he said.

So some of the tanks that once were used to store leachate aren’t needed anymore. The council’s working on getting rid of the extras, Byrne said.

He said the landfill also emits 361 cubic meters of gas per day, “which is abstracted [from the waste body] using a gas collection system, brought to the turbine, and converted into electricity, and then connected into the grid.”

The council did a study and found there’s viability to build a solar farm on the site, Byrne said, so it plans to pursue that possibility too.

Before the park fully opens, the council will need a sign-off from the EPA, Byrne said.

A question

After Byrne’s presentation, Máire O’Brien, of Portmarnock Beach Clean Coast, who is a member of the marine and coastal management committee, had a question about groundwater around the site.

“I was just wondering if there had been any testing on the local groundwater, on both east and west side of the landfill,” O’Brien said.

“Because I’m conscious of the fact that I know it, there’s a lining, but the landfill was there before the lining went in,” she said. “And there may be leachates coming out from the very old landfill, which may be going into the local groundwater.”

Council officials did not answer O’Brien’s question directly. By phone, after the meeting, O’Brien said she’d been wondering about this question for 20 years – and wasn’t surprised she hadn’t got an answer to it this time either.

But EPA monitoring groundwater reports for three locations around the landfill have been measuring quality against European Communities (Groundwater) Regulations for years.

Based on their findings, in March 2024, a consultant, on behalf of the council, filed a report with the EPA on behalf of the council to reduce the frequency of this monitoring from monthly to bi-annually for some things – and that monitoring for others can be ended entirely.

Funded by the Local Democracy reporting Scheme.