Blog_Murtagh

Tread Softly

6 May 2025

Sligo Regional Sports Centre, Cleveragh is one of the demonstration sites in the GEMINI project. As part of a wider retrofitting programme at the centre, a geothermal energy system, using heat extracted from up to 300 metres below the surface, will be installed beneath the car park to provide secure, low carbon, sustainable heat for the building and the swimming pool.

“

far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a geologist.”
And while that may not actually be true, it borrows the opening line from one of my favourite movies, which I thought would be a good way to start this blog post. So, here we go.

It was in January 2022 that Ken Russell from Atlantic Technological University (ATU) got in touch to wish me a happy new year. But that wasn’t all he wanted to tell me. He also said that he had been in contact with Geological Survey Ireland (GSI), and that they were actively looking for a demonstrator site somewhere in the north-west for a geothermal project. I immediately realised that there was a potential for some sort of genesis to this original proposal, a metamorphic potential even. I have always had an interest in geology, and in particular what benefits there can be from understanding the

Earth

beneath our feet. And I also knew that even if it didn’t come to me straight away, Sligo Co. Co. had enough property assets and buildings that surely one of them would be a suitable location for the project.

So, by the time Ken called me a couple of days later, it was the Regional Sports Centre at Cleveragh which had seen a relatively rapid uplift to the top of the list of potential candidates that he had provided.

The possibility of using geothermal heating was a subject that had been mentioned to me by the former Sligo Co. Co. Chief Executive, Ciaran Hayes. He had spoken about the potential that there might be at Sligo Race Course for geothermal, and how it could possibly be harnessed to provide the heat source for a district heating system for new or existing social or private housing in the greater Cleveragh area. Perhaps it was pie in the sky at the time, but lately it’s starting to look more like manna from a heaven beneath our feet.

Since then, we’ve seen the partners being selected, with the good folks in Codema leading the way, the funding application to SEUPB being carefully pieced together, before submission and success. And now we find ourselves right in the thick of it. Detailed plans are afoot, some results are already in, but there is a long, long way to go until we see the full benefit of the process that we have entered into.

Geothermal energy sometimes seems to be the forgotten, or underappreciated, sibling of the energy family. Where once we relied so much (and still do) on the other fossil energy siblings - coal, oil, gas, all from the depths of the Earth - perhaps now we can replace them, but in a more efficient way, in a way much kinder to the environment, to the climate and to the whole biosphere, by drawing up a different type of energy from below. One that can provide heat without pollution, and which is something we can harness rather than exploit. The efforts to decarbonise society have to start somewhere, so why not begin from the ground up?

Did you recognise the line?

GoodFellas (1990) directed by Martin Scorsese.

Sligo County Council is a GEMINI partner.