Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is. Minor incidents happen in operating plants, be they water or production plants, all the time and are corrected very quickly. Once what happened was noticed and the plant was shut down, the EPA and HSE had to be brought in in order to carry out the testing needed to determine whether there was an issue, the scale of the likely public health concern and whether things needed to be escalated. That decision cannot be made quickly because it is not a small thing to put 600,000 people on a boil water notice.

At the same time, to not put them on a boil water notice is not a small thing either. They had to take some time to get things right and make that call. I trust their judgment on making that call. Now it has been made, we are doing testing which is looking positive. I do not want to be to precise. I do not want people to take unnecessary risks and I hope to be able to give greater information to the public on this issue tomorrow. It is an important issue to raise and we will talk about what happened when I have the EPA report.

See this speech in context