COMHAIRLE CONTAE ÁTHA CLIATH THEAS
SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

South Dublin County Council Crest

MEETING OF TALLAGHT AREA COMMITTEE

Monday, February 26, 2024

MOTION NO. 4

MOTION: Councillor T. Costello

"Given the ongoing issues experienced in the Tallaght Area with increasing numbers of out of order public lighting and the longstanding delays on getting issue's resolved can a resolution be found for this as in some locations the lack of light is causing huge issues?"

REPORT:

These repairs are all the older type orange low pressure sodium (SOX) fittings. The replacement lamps for these fittings are no longer available.

If the lamps were available, the turnaround time between reporting of the outage to our maintenance contractor and the repair of the fitting is contractually 14 working days or less. As stated above, there are no lamps available on the open market.  

Under the current conditions referred to above, we have two options for repair.

The first is to use old lamps harvested from estates in the county that are being upgraded to LED. For regulatory reasons, these estates must be programmed for upgrade in liaison with ESB Networks.  Due to resource issues within ESB Networks, the rollout of this upgrade programme has been seriously impeded. This has resulted in very few harvested lamps being made available for reuse in order to repair outages. We have been and are currently in discussion with ESBN senior management regarding this resource issue and how they propose to resolve it.

The second option is to completely replace the old fitting with a new LED fitting. Due to the serious back log of outages and the shortage of harvested lamps, this is the only realistic option currently available to us. We are trying to work through the list of outages by prioritising the repair of the oldest reported outages first. We are also prioritising streets with more than one outage reported. We are currently upgrading approximately eight of these old light fittings per day to LED, which is the limit of our current resources. We are currently in discussion with our maintenance contractor regarding the possibility of increasing their resources for this ongoing task.

Note that if we had replacement lamps available as per Option 1, we would be repairing 20 of these older lights per day not 8, as per Option 2.