Irish Examiner view: Services on brink of collapse

The development of water services across the country needs to be addressed fast — and particularly so if the Government's ambition of 50,000 new homes annually is to be met

Uisce Éireann has a €10.2bn, five-year investment plan to achieve water and wastewater compliance and replace ageing and failing assets. Picture: iStock

When Uisce Éireann chairman Jerry Grant admitted last week that the State’s water and sewerage systems were “in a desperate state”, he wasn’t telling anyone who lives in this country anything they did not already know.

In fact, his words will have grated with those tens of thousands of householders, business owners, and farmers across the country who, as we highlighted in Monday's paper, have been living under "boil water" notices for years or have been affected by necessary maintenance work on the system.