Flushed away: the 'superloo' where no one wanted to go

PRESENT TENSE:WHEN IT COMES to spending a penny or two, town councils are often masters at it. But when it comes to putting a public convenience in place for the public to spend one, it often ends up in local disgruntlement, political opportunism and more toilet-related puns than you can muster. You can be sure this column will not shirk in its duty to add a few more over the next 700 words.

The Fingal Independentthis week reported on problems with a "superloo" in Swords, which is finally being scrapped after being used for one day out of its 10 years of life. It was withdrawn after local objections, which included complaints over its "spaceshiplike appearance".

Since then, it has lain in storage while councillors pondered what to do with it and offered it to various towns, all at a cost of €250,000. That’s a lot of money to flush away on what was once the very cutting edge of toilet technology; the iPod of urinals.

Superloos are what you might imagine would happen if a portaloo mated with a washing machine. The Swords superloo is, according to minutes of a Fingal County Council meeting in 2005, an "Automatic Public Convenience (APC), also known as a 'Universal Superloo'". (APC, as it happens, is also an acronym for Armoured Personnel Carrier. If you're in stock control for the US Army, there'sa mistake you wouldn't want to make.)

The noted features of the Universal Superloo include “one cubicle”, an oval shape of 4m by 2.5m. At which point you realise that if they had been smart enough in 2006, they could have sold it as a small, portable apartment. It not only washes and disinfects automatically after each use but has an “anti-graffiti interior”. Suggesting a flaw in the anti-graffiti aspects, the cost of running it included regular graffiti removal. (I first read that as being “anti-gravity” interior, which, while technologically impressive, would have tested the very limits of any self-disinfecting toilet.)

It sounds super. Except that nobody wants it. There had been proposals to have it put in Rush, Donabate and Howth, but all failed and now the council has negotiated its way out of the agreement and the superloo will finally be taken away.

Some love has been extended to the public toilet in Britain at least, where the Royal Institute of British Architects last month unveiled a series of artists’ interpretations of public toilets that could mark the return of what it called the “great British toilet”. There may be no such thing as the “great Irish toilet”, but we have our superloos. There are probably many happy superloo-owning councils around the country, but “Councillors Compliment Toilet” is not much of a local newspaper headline, so instead there is a repeated drip-drip of stories involving councillors who wished the superloo hadn’t been passed through the system.

There have been complaints in Bagenalstown, Tuam and Clonakility. In Dublin, the one beside O’Connell Bridge became such a hive of drug dealing activity that it was taken away and – presumably – buried 500 metres deeper than you’d bury nuclear waste. It was, it seems, the last public toilet left in Dublin city centre. You’re now more likely to come across a corncrake in Dublin 1.

A superloo in Tuam was the cause of some scandal a couple of years ago when it was reported that it was being used as a “cut-price love nest”, as one paper put it at the time. There was supposed to be a sensor that prevented two people from entering at a time, but love – and/or drunkenness – will find a way, and an incident at 1.30am was one too far for a local politician.

The superloo had already made itself unpopular by allegedly taking money but not opening its doors and, one occasion, destroying a woman’s clothes when its jets went off at the wrong time. Then, the town’s mayor suggested that the problem was being mirrored by superloo-owning towns across the country, and that maybe the “powers-that-be” would finally do something about the scourge. Sure enough, last year, a Sinn Féin councillor in Clonakilty complained of the cost of maintaining the local superloo.

“What do we get for it?” he asked. “A facility that only one person can use at a time; that is unusable for around five minutes after each use as it ‘self cleans’; a serviceman driving into town daily to replace toilet paper and soap and check the mechanics. And still, on occasions when people want to use it, very often the door won’t open. In fact, very often at night, you can see people using it for shelter as they urinate against the outside walls of it.”

The town council spokesperson’s response? That they would “look into” the problem. That may be an example of local government wit or not. You read too much on it and everything looks like a toilet pun.

Here ends this bog standard column.