People in north Louth ‘rightly angry’ about summer water outages

Water problems that have plagued the Shelagh and Hackballscross areas of north Louth this summer were the subject of a special meeting held in the area recently by Sinn Féin.

Sinn Féin TD Ruairí Ó Murchú and party colleague Cllr. Sionainn McCann met a number of affected residents from the areas at Naomh Malachi’s GFC last week after Uisce Éireann provided a detailed update about the causes of the water problems and their proposed solutions.

Deputy Ó Murchú said he had been in touch with Uisce Éireann ‘multiple times’ over the last number of weeks following water outages at Shelagh, Kilkerley and parts of Hackballscross, some of which lasted more than 48 hours.

Cllr McCann said the meeting at the Malachi’s clubrooms was ‘very positive’. She said that people were ‘rightly angry’ about the summer outages but wanted to know what was being done to ensure that they did not occur again.

Deputy Ó Murchú said that there have been problems with the water supply in these areas ‘going back to 2021’. He said there were issues with the Dunbin reservoir, the Hilltop pumps and those at the end of the line in parts of Hackballscross and Shelagh whose water is fed from the Hackballscross pumphouse were particularly affected.

The Louth TD said: ‘People were keen to hear about the work that has to take place to ensure that this doesn’t happen again including the installation of new pumps at Hilltop that would allow the reservoir to be filled in half the time because we have seen water outages in these areas this summer that have lasted more than 48 hours.

“People wanted to know about what Uisce Éireann has planned, alternative water supplies from the North or Dundalk and whether the decommissioned reservoir will be brought back to operation and what the timelines are for all this work”.

He said the major issue this summer in the area was the failure of the monitoring systems. He said: “Even if there were 14 different reasons as to why the water went out, the fact is that the monitoring system failed.

“Uisce Éireann has said it was embarrassing for them to come in and find out that the reservoir was empty and they didn’t know.

“They have made promises to address the monitoring system to make sure that the Dunbin reservoir is monitored and locals want assurances that there is a base level alarm system that if the water falls below a certain level, that would be seen in Dundalk”.

The TD said there were a number of complaints at the meeting about customer service and how people had contacted the water utility to be initially told there was no problem.

He said: “I have already spoken to Uisce Éireann about getting back to people on their individual complaints and have asked water officials to consider meeting with residents to give further, detailed information about the work they are planning to do to fix water supply in these areas”.