Water: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-21
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Seamus Healy (IND), Tipperary South

Senior executives of Irish Water got bonuses of up to €32,000 in 2024. This was on top of six-figure salaries ranging from €122,000 to €255,000. Some 47 people got bonuses of between €6,600 and €32,500. Over 560 staff on salaries of between €83,000 and €154,000 got bonuses of between €1,000 and €22,000. There are no bonuses paid to workers who are out at all hours of the day and night fixing bursts or working on boil water notices. This is an insult to lower paid staff and to consumers, who are suffering the absolute failures of Irish Water. Irish Water is another quango paid for by PAYE taxpayers. It is antidemocratic, anti-consumer and anti-public representative and that is the culture of Irish Water. It believes it is not answerable to anybody. It is hiding from the public. It has no public offices. It refuses to meet public representatives in open democratic forums like county council meetings. Consumers cannot meet an Irish Water official face to face. Yes, you can report a problem to a call centre. You might get a report back in a week, or maybe a month or maybe not at all. I believe it has contempt for the public and councillors alike and it refuses to notify planned outages to consumers. Other utilities like the ESB have no problem doing that. Irish Water refuses to do it.
Boil water notices are almost endemic in the system. In the past 12 months there have been continuous boil water notices across south Tipperary affecting the towns of Ardfinnan, Tipperary town, Cahir, Cashel, Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir, and lasting two, three and even six months on occasion. As we speak there is a boil water notice on the Ironmills supply and a major outage in the town of Clonmel. This is due to Irish Water's failure to have full-time caretakers at treatment plants, the lack of maintenance at those plants and the failure to have alarm systems on plants. There are also huge delays in dealing with burst water mains, particularly at weekends when Irish Water is reluctant to call out staff and leaves consumers without water for days on end. Irish Water should be abolished, and the responsibility transferred back to local authorities like county councils, giving them responsibility for water and wastewater services.
I raise another issue, which is the question of sewerage blockages in single houses and on combined drains. These blockages are a health hazard and Irish Water refuses to deal with them, claiming they are private issues, even though before the establishment of Irish Water these blockages were always dealt with by local authority staff. A blockage at a single location arising from old pipework can affect anything up to 50 households. It is simply impossible, impractical and unfair that individual householders should have to bear the significant costs involved. Irish Water should free these blockages in the same way as they were done in the past. I raise the question of the promised referendum to prevent the privatisation of water services and take them into public ownership. That was promised as far back as 2016. We want to see that referendum brought forward immediately.

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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