A new report highlights how Kildare is negatively impacted by water outages and needs urgent infrastructure upgrades.
The Burst Report was compiled by Treasa Keegan, creator of the Celbridge Politics Group. It uses publicly available data on water issues, outages and causes in Kildare between 2018 and 2023.
Reacting to the report, Labour Councillor for Maynooth Angela Feeney said,’ What’s staggering to me is the scale of the problem it reveals. To think that once every two days there’s an outage somewhere in Kildare is shocking.’’
The findings illustrate that 15,578 customer tickets were logged with Uisce Éireann in Kildare over the five-year period.
This equates to an average of 6.55 Customer Service tickets opened daily with Uisce Éireann by customers in Kildare, more than one every four hours.
Celbridge Councillor Rupert Heather said, ‘ Between Celbridge and Leixlip, almost 5000 tickets were raised with Uisce Eireann between 2018 and 2023. That goes to show the extent of these problems. There’s also a lack of transparency in terms of public information about these outages.’
The report highlights the growing challenges in Kildare’s water network and concludes that advance warnings of water outages either do not reach customers or are ineffective.
It also emphasises the need for improved communication and calls for action to prioritise network upgrades in hotspot areas.
‘The government has promised a referendum on the ownership of public water services. It’s long overdue, and we need to have that soon,’ Councillor Feeney adds.