Latest: We simply don't know about the state of our pipes, says Irish Water
Irish Water admits it is unclear about the state of its pipes and says there are not enough spare parts in case of emergency.
The utility company has just published a report into a mass supply failure in the North East this summer.
It found that it did not act fast enough to fix the burst at the Staleen treatment plant which left nearly 100,000 homes and businesses without water for almost a week.
Jerry Grant, Irish Water's Managing Director, said: "We simply don't know the details of all our assets in the ground, we don't know their condition and we don't have automatically spare parts available on the inventory around the place.
"There is no question that we have 300 bursts every month in our network, and all of those bursts affect communities and affect businesses."
Irish Water has been forced to admit it took too long to communicate the severity of the Drogheda outage this summer.
Almost 100,000 homes were without water for almost a week in the Louth/Meath area as a result of a major pipe burst at the Staleen treatment plant.
Last July householders across Louth and Meath were forced to queue up to fill water bottles after the main supplying the region burst.
The pipe had ruptured the previous summer, but this time it took almost seven days to fully restore supplies to the thousands of people affected.
Irish Water has now released the findings of a review into how it handled the crisis.
It has found the utility should have escalated the matter within the first 24 hours so that it could better inform those affected, but the report stresses this would not have sped up the repair works.
However, the investigation does also note a failure to resolve access rights to the land involved in 2016 delayed the repair works, and that revelation is unlikely to go down well with those who were affected.
Irish Water has now updated its protocols for incidents like these in the hopes a similar situation will not happen again.
