For years Clonmel has had 'water stoppages', but worse is coming down the pipeline
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For years, businesses and residents in Clonmel have had to deal with a seemingly neverending string of problems with their water supply.
It's important to know, though, the town is not short of water: it has three separate water supplies. We are, instead, talking about water “stoppages”, and there have been quite a few of them this year.
Hotels, hairdressers, pubs, and any other business that relies heavily on water have had to close as the taps have run dry time and time again. One estimate for this year alone is 50 stoppages and even Uisce Éireann has admitted that at one point 30,000 people in and around the town were without water.
Like the famous line of a verse of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, it has at times seemed very much a case of “water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink”.
Paul Higgins, who has been a businessman in the town for decades and whose family run Mulcahy’s hotel and pub restaurant in the centre of the town, says he is sick of it.
“We have issues with them cutting off the water regularly,” he said. “I mean, sometimes it is literally every other second week and cut off without notice. It can be off from anything from an hour to 24 hours.”
Both he and his son have had to go home and fill up five-gallon drums from their own homes and then bring them back to their 18-bed hotel so people can flush the toilets. But they have also had to give guests refunds when they couldn’t have a shower.
They have been told that installing a water tank and extra pumps will cost the hotel €7,000 to €8,000. “We will have to do it because it is happening too often,” Paul said.
“I’d say it has happened 10-plus times, at least. It is well into double figures. I appreciate you have to upgrade the water system but if it causes too many problems to close businesses, there has to be another way to handle it.
“The hairdressers have to, for example, close during the day and we struggle on carrying water to cisterns and we have some back-up supply but not enough to last long enough.”
Country Pork butcher Tony O'Donnell, who has been in business in the town for 23 years, also bemoans the lack of notice.
“That's the killer thing,” he said, to nods of agreement from the steady stream of customers to his Irishtown premises in Clonmel, by the famous West Gate arch.
For its part, Uisce Éireann insists issues experienced in Clonmel are a result of decades of under-investment in water infrastructure in the area—something that is hotly disputed by the utility’s many detractors in the town.
Currently, the town is served by three water treatment plants—Glenary, Poulavanogue, and Monroe.
Glenary, built in the 1970s, is—says Uisce Éireann—constantly prone to service interruptions and it needs to be upgraded. Significant upgrades to both the plant and local trunk mains are planned and include full rehabilitation of the existing sand filters, and a new pipeline to Glenary reservoir.
Poulavanogue, which was built in the 1950s, is a second source, and is located in the older part of the town centre. As a soft water source, it is most people’s preferred choice.
But Uisce Éireann says it has problems treating water during heavy rainfall events and outages have been experienced from it in recent years. Added to that, the utility says there is no storage reservoir and there are issues around supplying it with water during dry periods.
Monroe Water Treatment Plant to the north of Clonmel town seems to be the utility’s jewel in the crown of its supply to not just the north of the town it serves now but for the rest of the town in years to come.
What is now called the “Poulavanogue/Monroe” project is due to be completed by the end of 2026, by which time 6 million litres a day will be coming from the Monroe plant alone. Added to that, 14km of mains will be replaced.
However, despite Uisce Éireann’s best efforts, if you talk to just about any business, you will hear a variation of what the Higgins family has had to go through. There is such a unified level of derision towards the utility that it was impossible to find anybody with a good word to say about Uisce Éireann.
One of the main criticisms is the apparent lack of notice before water is switched off. In its defence, the utility says that while it tries to restore water as quickly as possible in unplanned disruptions, “it is not always possible to provide advance notice to customers”.
However, it states information—including the restoration time—is added to the Uisce Éireann website as soon as possible following notification of the water supply issue. They said that for planned disruptions, Uisce Éireann endeavours to ensure customers are given a minimum of 48 hours’ notice prior to any planned water shut-offs.
A spokesperson also told the : “Uisce Éireann acknowledges the impact supply issues have had on businesses and residents in Clonmel over recent years and we are working to address the causes.” To that end, he said, Uisce Éireann has committed to investing €20m in the town’s water infrastructure, with works completed “already leading to significant improvements in water supply in recent months”.
Pub landlord Richie Gleeson said outages are one thing but there is more trouble for the town coming down the tracks. “I haven’t experienced any real outages for quite some time,” he said.
“There have been outages in the past and it has been horrendous. But the biggest issue we have with Uisce Éireann coming down the road are plans in place to shut off one of our water supplies here and put us onto a hard water supply.”
What he is talking about are plans to shut the Poulavanogue treatment plant by 2026, and move most of the town onto the Monroe plant. Uisce Éireann concedes the water is “harder” but Mr Gleeson and other businesses refer to it as “severely hard water” that is going to seriously impact their businesses.
One of those is his next-door neighbour, butcher Tony O'Donnell. “If that hard water comes in, like—whatever about shops, ordinary households are going to be in trouble,” he said.
“I do not think people realise what it's going to cost when the water starts eating into pipes and household electrical appliances that depend on water.”
About a fifth of the town is already using water from the Monroe plant and some of those told the about their own experiences. One mother-of-two who did not want to be named said she has gone through four washing machines, two dishwashers, and 10 kettles since her estate was moved onto the hard water source in around 2011.
That move happened before Uisce Éireann took over but it is a sign of things to come if the rest of the town is moved onto this water source. As well as replacing her appliances, and as well as replacing her shower heads every year, she spends nearly €1,000 a year on bottled water.
She also has to spend €27 every six weeks for the crystals for the water softening system which cost her €2,160 to install and which costs her €160 every year to get serviced.
The Higgins family in Mulcahys Hotel has three €20,000 steam ovens that are going to have to be refitted because hard water will “play havoc” with them. He also said that due to the unreliability of the water system, he is going to have to invest about €5,000 in a water tank on his roof to tide him over when the water is cut off.
Mr Gleeson said: “You can ask anybody else outside of town it destroys everything mechanical, everything. I'm very worried and none of us are prepared for something like this and it's going to cost us dearly.
While complaints and boil notices are at an all-time low in the town after a year of on-off stoppages, the future could still well see more issues for a wider population that was not far from the end of its tether until only a few months ago.
But the town has become, in recent years, more organised to take on Uisce Éireann and people are still angry, despite the amount of work the utility has carried out.
It remains to be seen around whose neck will the Munroe plant end up being the proverbial albatross—Uisce Éireann chiefs or the people of Clonmel.