'Crisis level' has been reached with water supply problems in Tipperary's largest town

Strong appeals have been made to Irish Water to solve the problems with the water supply in Clonmel, which local politicians have claimed are now at crisis level.
District Mayor Michael Murphy has stated that the phones were “hopping” because of outages over the previous two weekends, and it wasn’t good enough.
Businesses and residents were hugely impacted as a result of interruptions to the supply.
He told a meeting of Clonmel Borough District that he intended to raise the issue when he and Deputy Mayor John Fitzgerald met with Tánaiste Leo Varadkar two days after the meeting.
Cllr Murphy said that the lack of investment in the town’s water infrastructure was his number one concern.
They were in the middle of drawing up a very ambitious county development plan, which predicted growth of 30% in Clonmel’s population between now and 2030, as well as the planned development of an advanced technology park at Ballingarrane. However, they didn’t have enough water to service the existing houses in the town.
He knew of residents in Albert Street and Western Park who had installed new boilers but the water pressure wasn’t strong enough to service them.
The Mayor said the proposal to extract water from the river had been forgotten about and the supply to Clonmel was depending on a borehole in Monroe, because the existing plants in Glenary and Poulavanogue weren’t fit for purpose.
He knew that the water services section of Tipperary County Council was beating the same drum with Irish Water.
Cllr Siobhán Ambrose said the town was at crisis level with its water supply and the situation was critical. Residents and businesses such as hairdressers and those serving food had all been affected recently. It was a hugely difficult situation and she didn’t know what they were going to do.
The dedicated phone line through which councillors could contact Irish Water about outages only operated from Monday to Friday.
“It’s a joke, it would only happen in Ireland,” she said.
Irish Water staff who answered the phone had stated that Clonmel must be the worst town in the country for outages and there didn’t seem to be an end to it.
Cllr Ambrose said that people were irate when they contacted the councillors, and yet they had nothing to do with it.
There was also poor pressure in areas including Bianconi Drive and there were issues in Kilcash and Kilsheelan.

District Mayor Michael Murphy says that water outages in the town "aren't good enough"

Cllr Pat English said the problems had been going on for years at this stage and were all down to a lack of investment in the Poulavanogue and Glenary treatment plants. Those plants were now breaking down on a regular basis because they hadn’t received the necessary maintenance or investment.
They had been promised a major scheme to extract water from the river but that proposal was now off the agenda.
The alternative of a temporary supply from Monroe was at least four years down the line.
Cllr English said that “an awful lot of people’s livelihoods are affected by what was going on.” They would be in dire straits if they didn’t have a proper water supply for any new industry that would be coming, and in his view they needed an urgent meeting with senior management of Irish Water.
“This has gone on for far too long,” said Cllr English.
He said that Irish Water was a quango set up by the government, and he feared the day when Irish Water would have total responsibility for the supply and the county council wouldn’t have anything to do with it.
Cllr John Fitzgerald asked if it was time to give consideration to the privatisation of the water supply. He said he was very frustrated by the situation, which was caused by a lack of funding. As a councillor he never felt so helpless as he did when an outage occurred. The anger of people was palpable.
“This is something that has been taken out of our hands and it’s not good,” he said.
Cllr Niall Dennehy said it was an awful pity that President Michael D Higgins had got out of his bed on Christmas Day in 2013 and signed off on the legislation that brought Irish Water into existence. He did that at the behest of his political masters, he said.
District Manager Sinead Carr said she shared the concerns expressed by the members.
She said that a number of the council’s projects had been delayed, or at least a strong question mark placed over them until issues of how water would be supplied or how waste water would be treated were addressed.
Development didn’t occur unless you had the relevant infrastructure to facilitate it. You could have all the population predictions and land zoning in the world but the land had to be serviced.
Ms Carr said that water was one of the highest priorities in the country in terms of development. Concerns had to be addressed and investment filtered into Irish Water and then filtered down to areas of the country.
John Crowley, senior executive engineer with Tipperary County Council, said Irish Water planned to upgrade the filters at Glenary and that should make a big difference.
They would also feed part of the Poulavanogue scheme, which was the most troublesome plant, from Glenary.
The outage that affected the Glenary plant on February 5 happened as a result of a planned ESB outage. An outage at the same plant on February 12 had been caused by a colour monitor malfunction following heavy rain, and the plant had to be shut down.
In both cases the plant was “down” for a very short time but it took time for people living at higher levels to have the full pressure restored.
On both occasions the caretaker had acted immediately and the council couldn’t have done any more.
Mr Crowley said that Irish Water was carrying out tests on several boreholes at the Monroe scheme and examining the quality of the water available, although he didn’t know when these tests would be completed.
Work had also been approved to replace in the region of 1,600 metres of pipes, probably in August, in an area of Clonmel including Bolton Street, Cashel Street, William Street, Morton Street and as far as Kickham Street.
They would also see what could be done to improve the water pressure in Bianconi Drive.
Mr Crowley said works were also planned for the Kilcash plant that should improve the quality of the water in the area, while work was also scheduled for Kilsheelan and Lisvernane.

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