A GALWAY suburb which has experienced periodic cuts in water supply over the past five years has again been without running water for the past four days.
Moycullen community activist Noel Thomas, a landscape gardener and father of young children, said the situation in his village and in part of Bearna is “diabolical” and is causing severe hardship to families and businesses.
He said he believed the community of several thousand residents on the city/county border was bearing the burden of a “completely inadequate” water supply for Galway city.
He and neighbours are planning a public meeting to highlight the issue, and the “lack of information from” or “adequate warnings provided by” Galway County Council.
Galway County Council has confirmed “certain areas in Moycullen and Bearna, particularly the higher locations, have experienced disruption to their water supplies. This has been caused by difficulties in Galway city in supplying the Tonabrocky reservoir which serves the area.
"The council is liaising with Galway City Council to resolve the situation as quickly as possible. In the meantime, the council has deployed water tankers to assist in the affected areas," the local authority said in a statement to The Irish Times.
However, Mr Thomas and Mari Ó Neachtain, a mother of four children, say the local authority’s response is totally inadequate.
“We woke up last Thursday with no water, in the first week of the new school term,” Ms Ó Neachtain said.
“It came back briefly on Friday, but cut again and I had to switch off the washing machine, which had the kids’ uniforms in it, halfway through the cycle.
“There is nothing in our tank, we can’t flush toilets, or shower, and there has been no sign of any tanker delivery as of Saturday,” she said. “The big problem is that there is never any warning, or information.”
The residents said they can no longer tolerate a situation which had occurred over the past five years during dry winter spells and warm summer periods.
“Last Christmas was the worst,” Ms Ó Neachtain said. “We had no water on December 25th, and it was still off on New Years’s Eve. We had no heating, and at that stage we had to leave the house altogether.
“You are so relieved when the water does come back that you tend to try to forget about it until the next time . . . but it has been happening for far too long,” she said.
Mr Thomas said the local authority “keeps telling us that this is a temporary problem, when we know it is a basic infrastructural issue”.
When demand exceeds supply from the city’s Tonabrocky reservoir, supplies can be augmented from Oughterard.
However, Moycullen “gets bypassed to ensure the city is fed”, Mr Thomas said.