The quality of drinking water in Ireland ‘remains high’, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has said, with over 99.8% of samples compliant with safety standards.
However, many of Ireland’s water supplies still lack ‘robust treatment to guarantee their long-term resilience’, the EPA said in its Drinking Water Quality in Public Supplies Report 2024.
“Our public water quality remains very high,” commented Dr Micheál Lehane, EPA director. “This means that the public can remain confident that drinking water supplied to their homes is safe to drink.”
Remedial Action List
As of the end of last year, there were 45 water supplies on the EPA’s Remedial Action List, serving nearly 497,000 people, which is an improvement on the previous year, when there were 57 supplies affecting 561,000 people.
However, seven supplies have remained on the Remedial Action List for more than two years, with no completion date to address these yet provided.
Some 59 ‘boil water’ notices were in place in 2024, down from 91 the previous year. These notices affected some 95,000 people, down from 254,000 in 2023. Some 33 of these boil water notices were in place for more than 30 days.
“While I welcome the decrease in the number of people served by ‘at-risk’ supplies, the EPA – through our audit programme – continues to identify supplies that lack adequate resilience,” Lehane added. “Uisce Éireann needs to implement the findings of Risk Assessments to improve the resilience of supplies and maintain the quality of our drinking water. Long-term sustained investment in water services infrastructure is required to provide this resilience into the future.”
Lead contamination
The EPA‘s report also states that while a national strategy to address lead contamination has been in place since 2015, progress in removing lead from the water supply network has been ‘far too slow’. It called for an acceleration of these efforts, given that the legal limit for lead will halve by 2036.
“Lead in our drinking water is a cumulative risk to human health and must be removed from our supply network,” added Noel Byrne, EPA programme manager. Read more here.
