Water: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-21
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Liam Quaide (SD), Cork East

We could spend all day every day discussing the dysfunction of Uisce Éireann and the many forms it takes. In the brief time I have, I will share a vignette of that dysfunction and its impact on people with reference to Knockane, Castlemartyr, County Cork. It is a townland in east Cork in my own constituency where there was an outage over Christmas that affected just eight households. This situation is replicated throughout the country. A small number of families was involved but the impact at that time of year was prolonged and severe. This outage occurred on 19 December and lasted until 28 December. The residents had no running water at all during that time. I am informed the problem relates to an antiquated pipe that needs replacement. Outages were occurring frequently in this townland as far back as September.
One family was in a very vulnerable situation. They have a young child with a medical condition who was recently discharged from hospital. They were left stranded throughout that time. Over those ten days or so, my office was calling on Uisce Éireann to supply water tankers and to give clear updates on the state of repairs. I am sure other local public representatives were also advocating for the families affected. Despite that level of representation, the family I mentioned had to take to the airwaves six days into the outage, on Christmas Eve, to highlight their situation.
The family were at pains to emphasise that the ground workers with Uisce Éireann were working very hard to resolve the issue and were compassionate and very receptive to them. However, no water tanker was supplied at any stage during that ten-day period. This was despite residents receiving many reference numbers for requests they made to Uisce Éireann's Kafkaesque online system for tankers. There were two days on which bottled water was not supplied to homes. Some of the considerable distress this caused could easily have been addressed even if the repairs were always going to take as long as they did.
Knockane, Castlemartyr is one of many examples from around the country where Uisce Éireann's cold faceless bureaucracy is failing people at the most basic level. Its problems are not the fault of its ground workers. There is a dramatic gap in accountability, transparency, accessibility and basic functioning in Uisce Éireann that the Government needs to address urgently.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-31T01:00:51+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-21