A lack of water infrastructure is putting the Government’s house building targets at risk, an expert has warned. 

Famously, Ireland is one of the wetter countries on earth; however, there are parts of the country where the State lacks the infrastructure to treat it before it can be safely drunk. 

In the Programme for Government, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael pledged to build 300,000 new homes by the end of 2030 - on average 50,000 a year. 

On The Pat Kenny Show, housing lecturer at TU Dublin Lorcan Sirr said a lack of infrastructure makes this target much more difficult to achieve. 

“Irish Water have said they can only supply 30 to 35,000 new houses a year,” he said. 

“The Government are insisting that we’re going to deliver 50,000 - so, there’s a gap.” 

A house under construction Ballyshannon. Picture by: Alamy.com.

Dr Sirr continued that much of the current infrastructure is “incredibly leaky”. 

“We’re leaking around 37% of all the water that comes through from the other reservoirs,” he said. 

“Which is a huge amount.” 

Recently while researching the issue, Dr Sirr found that the town of Tralee in County Kerry was losing around 6.5 million litres of water a day. 

“Which is enough water to supply a town twice the size of Tralee,” he said. 

“So, we have serious issues there and all those issues come from not investing.” 

Funding

On the question of blame, Dr Sirr described Uisce Éireann as “not perfect” but added that they “did inherit a mess”. 

“A lot of this comes back to two things,” he said. 

“One, a fear of making hard decisions and then actually investing in things - because that will cost money. 

“Also, the second component is, they expected the private sector to step in and take this burden off their shoulders. 

“That has happened hugely in housing over the last 30 years, where the majority of our private and public housing is now delivered by the private sector. 

“But they expected when Irish Water was formed that some form of private entity, as in the UK, would step in and they would take on the burden and charge users.

“That didn’t happen, so the State got stuck with it.”

Main image: A woman filling a glass of water from the kitchen sink tap. Picture by: incamerastock / Alamy