Cloonfad water outages
Senator Scahill raised repeated water outages in Cloonfad and the impact on a local hospitality business that could not open on key trading days.
In April, last year, I highlighted water outages in the village of Cloonfad in west Roscommon. I had a Commencement matter that month. I also highlighted a hospitality business that contacted me unable to open on Good Friday last year because of the loss of its water supply. On Monday last, I was copied on a message by the same hospitality business titled "Enough is enough" highlighting that it was now looking at another high-footfall day on which they would not be able to open due to the fact that it had no water supply on that particular day. That was actually the fourth time last week the water supply had stopped in the village of Cloonfad. In June last year, following a lot of correspondence with Irish Water and with the office of the Minister, Deputy Browne, I got correspondence from Irish Water stating it was pleased to advise that an update had become available. The management department had confirmed that Uisce Éireann was currently carrying out designs for the replacement of approximately 5 km of water mains around Cloonfad and that there were currently no timelines available for construction. We allowed time for that to happen. That was June last year. Last week, when I had the first of the outages in Cloonfad, I contacted Irish Water for an update on this. On Thursday, I looked for a follow-up on that. This morning I spoke with Roscommon County Council to find out where the blockage and the barrier to completing and starting this work was in Cloonfad. It seems to be down to the reinstatement of the road. I left a message with Irish Water this morning for somebody to contact me before I came into the Chamber this afternoon. Nobody has contacted me. I want to highlight once again that we are constantly sending messages into these Oireachtas lines for Oireachtas Members. We are making representations for constituents. I know Senator Stephenson raised a point earlier about the Government and us blaming some of these agencies for the blockages but if they are not showing the respect to us as representatives and coming back to us when we are looking for these answers, what are we meant to do about that? I would welcome the debate on flooding but I would also welcome a debate on these Oireachtas email addresses and contact lines in order that we can start getting some standard answers on it.