Taoiseach 'nearly as invested in the issue' of water quality as Cork TD

Taoiseach Simon Harris has claimed that he is almost as invested in the issue of water quality in Cork city as one northside TD.

Mr Harris was responding in the Dáil on Wednesday to Cork North Central People Before Profit-Solidarity TD Mick Barry who had raised the issue of discoloured water in Cork.

Mr Barry thanked the Taoiseach for correspondence he had received from Mr Harris relating to water quality in the city, with a reply attached from the chief executive officer of Uisce Éireann.

“The correspondence, however, does not include what you promised to get for me, which is a timescale for the resolution of the problem,” Mr Barry said.

“No, the correspondence does name mid-November as a target date for the completion of a number of local flushing programmes, but local flushing is only lessening the problem, and even at that, only temporarily.

“It is not solving it.”

As previously reported in The Echo, after the then Irish Water’s new Cork water treatment facility on the Lee Road opened in July 2022, the water utility company noted a sharp rise in complaints about water quality as brown and orange discoloured water began to flow from taps in multiple locations across the city, on both the north and south sides.

Mr Barry told Mr Harris that the correspondence received from Uisce Éireann indicated that a major part of the problem in Cork was that more than 50% of the water main pipes in the city were cast iron and a century or more old.“It says that replacing [the pipes] requires an investment of half a billion euro and then, it says, that would have to be across several decades,” he said.

“Now, I hope to God that the chief executive officer of Uisce Éireann isn’t telling the people of Cork that it’s going to take decades to solve this problem. Is it?”

Replying, the Taoiseach thanked Mr Barry for “my now weekly exchange on what is a genuinely serious issue” and he added: “I’m now nearly as invested in the issue as he is at this stage, as he has brought to my attention on quite a few times”.

Mr Harris said that he intended to push for a timeline on the completion of works to address the issue of water quality in Cork city.

“It’s not an unfair point to ask for a continued timeline, and I will pursue that,” the Taoiseach said. “I do welcome some of the work that has been done by Uisce Éireann and I did get a sense from their correspondence that there is a high level of awareness in relation to this.”