COMHAIRLE CONTAE ÁTHA CLIATH THEAS
SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

MEETING OF SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

Monday, May 13, 2024

MOTION NO. 3

MOTION: Councillor C. O'Connor

That this Council calls on the Chief Executive to take immediate and effective action to deal with the situation where many public lights across our County are out of order and subject to huge delays regarding repairs?

REPORT:

There were 1,000 public lights reported out of order at the March Council Meeting. This number has remained stable due to the fact that we have been using any recycled lamps we have available to make repairs, addressing the oldest outages first. 

These lamps have been harvested from the limited number of estates that are currently being upgraded to LED throughout the county.

In order to carry out these upgrades we must liaise on site with ESBN. The resource issue with ESBN and their availability to attend site with us has not improved since the last report to Council on the matter in March.  We, on the other hand, continue to send in service requests to them, seeking agreed dates for site works. Our own maintenance contractor remains fully resourced to meet any responses by ESBN to our requests. Unfortunately, only a very small number of these are currently being scheduled by ESBN into their own works programme, resulting in very few estates being upgraded throughout the county at present. 

The more upgrades take place, the more recycled lamps we have to repair outages. In addition, as the number of LEDs in the county increases, the less of these old orange lamps are left for us to maintain. 

We are continuing to communicate with ESBN to effect an increase in their allocated resource to progress our programme. We will also continue to keep Councillors informed on any progress with ESBN that may result in alleviating this undesirable  situation.