Limerick families without water for three days with no Irish Water personnel available to fix issue

IRISH Water has been accused of having an “antiquated” system, after it emerged families were left without water all through last weekend.

Twenty homes in Clarina were cut off from the network between Friday evening and Monday afternoon, with local councillor Fergus Kilcoyne claiming he called the utility on 10  separate occasions after residents made contact.

He added there is “genuine fury” among residents in Ballycarney and Briska Beg following the loss of supply – and this has intensified after Cllr Kilcoyne was told that Irish Water could not make contact with an engineer in the Limerick area to rectify the problem.

“Things aren’t up to scratch,” he told the Limerick Leader, “Irish Water needs to work in association with Limerick City and County Council. For me, as a public representative, it is not good enough.”

The Independent councillor first made contact with Irish Water on Friday evening on foot of a complaint from one resident. He then called several more times on Saturday.

On both occasions, he called the 24-hour emergency line, as did many of the 20 householders in the estates.

Having called throughout Saturday and Sunday, Cllr Kilcoyne says it was only after he asked to speak to a supervisor, he learnt the utility firm was unable to locate anyone in the Limerick area.

And, having logged the outage on Friday, it was only at around 4.30pm on Monday he received an email confirming supply had been restored.​

“It’s antiquated stuff really,” the City West member added.

An Irish Water spokesperson confirmed some customers in Clarina experienced outages over the weekend due to large leaks in the network serving the area.

“As soon as we became aware of the issue, Irish Water and Limerick City and County Council took action to divert water from other areas to compensate for this leakage. It took some time for supply to return to all parts of the network, but all customers should now have their water supply restored,” they said, apologising  for any inconvenience.