Lights out for over 350 areas without LED upgrades

There are 352 public lighting outages right now across South County Dublin, in areas that have not yet been upgraded to LED lighting.

More than one-third of the outages reported, as of the beginning of September this year, are in Clondalkin, with 128 reported across the area.

Across Tallaght 110 outages were reported, with 53 outages in Rathfarnham-Templeogue, 28 outages each in Firhouse-Boher-nabreena and Palmerstown-Fonthill, with just five outages in Lucan.

These outages represent six per cent of the total remaining stock of low-pressure sodium light fittings that have yet to be replaced by South Dublin County Council, with 6,000 left to be replaced across the county.

These figures were shared in response to a question at the September council meeting from Cllr Yvonne Collins (FF), who asked for an update in relation to the number of public lighting outages in areas which have not yet been upgraded to LED lighting and the average timescale for repair.

SDCC director of planning and transport Eoin Burke said that repairs to the older types of sodium lighting were delayed because “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.

“The only option open to us is to use old lamps harvested from estates in the county that are being upgraded to LED.”

He said that due to “resource issues” within ESB Networks, the rollout of the LED upgrades programme is “seriously impeded”.

“Therefore it is difficult to forecast how many lamps we may or may not have available to us at any given time to carry out repairs, and as such, we cannot provide an average timescale for repair. However, we do try and address the oldest outages first,” he said.

Cllr Collins also asked for an estimated timeline for when the LED replacement programme was likely to be completed across South Dublin.

Mr Burke said that while the council could replace some 1,700 SON fittings themselves (and estimated those would be completed by end of 2026), they were “wholly dependent” on ESB for upgrades to SOX light fittings.

“Currently we are upgrading on average 90 fittings a month, given their current levels of resource support,” he said.

“If this continues over the next four/five months, we will have this number down to 5,600 at the end of this year.”

Mr Burke projected that upgrades to all 6,000 remaining SOX fittings would be completed by summer 2031.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme