‘Short-term fixes will no longer cut it’ for Ballyhooly water issues

No long-term solution is on the cards for residents of Ballyhooly, in East Cork, for a water-pressure issue that has been affecting the area for a decade.

Social Democrats TD Liam Quaide raised the issue in the Dáil this week, saying that for many residents of the village, “the very basic need for a consistent supply of water to drink, bathe in, or use in appliances such as dishwashers and showers, has been denied to them for many years”.

“Residents in Ballyhooly have to deal with extremely low water pressure, alternating with a non-existent supply of water for prolonged periods. This has hit people with chronic illness, disability, and age-related care needs the hardest. It has also severely impacted the local school and farming community.

“In recent months, there has been a reprieve from a full-scale outage, but water pressure remains very low and there is no clear timeframe on the extent of works required to resolve the issue.

“Short-term fixes will no longer cut it for Ballyhooly. When are we going to see movement on this essential project that will allow the village to thrive?”

Taoiseach Micheál Martin told Mr Quaide: “I have spoken to [Uisce Éireann] representatives about the Cork situation more generally, in terms of water quality issues and they are working on that.”

However, a spokesperson for Uisce Éireann told The Echo: “Delivery of any capital projects are subject to funding, internal governance processes, procurement, planning permissions, legal and environmental regulations. It can take a number of years to bring any capital project through all of these stages.”

Residents of the village previously told The Echo that the water-pressure issue has been affecting the area for over a decade.

Kiera Scanlon, who lives in one of the estates most impacted, said: “The summer was really bad, for two months the water was just a trickle.

“It impacts everything in the house — heating, dishwasher, washing machine, shower. When [it’s] really bad you can’t flush toilets, you can’t wash your hands. The water coming in isn’t enough to fill up the tank, so sometimes you can be in the middle of having a shower and the water is just gone.

“We had no heating over the winter, and we have been getting onto Uisce Éireann frequently to ask what’s being done. We just want to know how much longer we have to live like this.”