Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

What occurred in the past seven days in Skerries in north County Dublin is nothing short of a disgrace and an unmitigated disaster. I refer to the failure of the supply of water to between 4,000 and 5,000 citizens in that community in what I can only assume was a predictable incident for which some sort of contingency plan should have been made. I would also like to highlight the pretty much abject failure of Irish Water to adequately communicate with citizens in the particular part of Skerries that is affected. My phone started ringing on Thursday evening in respect of water outages. Those outages resulted in numerous houses losing their supply completely. Irish Water stated that this was because the houses were on elevated ground or at the extremities of the network. Information has now been provided to locals, including by individual Irish Water engineers, to the effect that there might be a missing link within the network in that part of the community. I find this unacceptable. Planning permissions were granted and hundreds of thousands of euro have been parted with by dozens of families in recent months and years, yet they cannot rely on the basic principle that the State will supply them with water. On their behalf, I find what is happening completely unacceptable.

I would like to see cogent and deliverable plans put in place as quickly as possible so that a recurrence of this problem can be avoided in future. If that means an alteration to the capital plans of Irish Water, so be it. I absolutely insist that this matter be dealt with adequately, efficiently and speedily, so that we can ensure that this does not happen again. All that happened was that it did not rain for two weeks in the northern part of the county and all of a sudden thousands of homes have lost their water. I find that totally unacceptable.

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