Kildare councillor calls on government to hold referendum on ownership of public water services

A Kildare county councillor has called on the government to hold a referendum in relation to the ownership of public water services.

Labour Party Cllr Angela Feeney made the comments in reference to a new report which highlights how Kildare is negatively impacted by water outages and needs urgent infrastructure upgrades. 

The Burst Report was compiled by Treasa Keegan, creator of the Celbridge Politics Group.

It uses publicly available data on water issues, outages and causes in Kildare between 2018 and 2023. 

Reacting to the report, Cllr Feeney said: "What's staggering to me is the scale of the problem it reveals; to think that once every two days there's an outage somewhere in Kildare is shocking.’"

The findings illustrate that 15,578 customer tickets were logged with Uisce Éireann in Kildare over the five-year period. 

This equates to an average of 6.55 Customer Service tickets opened daily with Uisce Éireann by customers in Kildare, more than one every four hours.

Her party colleague, Cllr Rupert Heather, added: "Between Celbridge and Leixlip, almost 5,000 tickets were raised with Uisce Eireann between 2018 and 2023... That goes to show the extent of these problems.

"There's also a lack of transparency in terms of public information about these outages."  

Cllr Feeney also said: "The government has promised a referendum on the ownership of public water services."

"It's long overdue, and we need to have that soon," she concluded.

The Burst Report can be listened to here.

Labour Party Cllr Angela Feeney. File photograph.