Irish Water commit to “significant upgrade” of Miltown water issues

CLARE Fianna Fáil TD, Cathal Crowe, has said that Irish Water has committed to “significant upgrades” to address water supply issues in Miltown Malbay.

Residents in the Miltown and surrounding areas have been experiencing outages and interruptions to their supply for several months now and they are at their wits’ end.

The most recent outage occurred when a water main burst on June 14 at Coore, which was later repaired.

However, this led to a significant delay in supply returning to the Dunsallagh, Ballard and Glendine Group Water Schemes in the area, with supply eventually coming back on June 20.

This, Irish Water says, it because of “major issues with the operation and maintenance of the Group Water Schemes”.

“This has been a long-running saga for households in Miltown Malbay and so many surrounding areas too,” said Deputy Crowe.

“It is completely unacceptable that some homes were left without running water for almost a week and in some cases longer, when we are in the middle of a health pandemic and hygiene is so important.

“I have made a number of representations to Irish Water on this, though, and am pleased to have received confirmation now that a significant upgrade to the Group Water Schemes is to be undertaken in the next two months, which I’m told will resolve the supply return issues.

“This is extremely welcome news, but I would also encourage Irish Water to upgrade the water mains in the area too, to prevent such outages ever happening in the first place.”