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FOR THE NEXT six weeks, people will be limited in how they can use water.
Irish Water has put into force a National Water Conservation Order, or hosepipe ban, that will remain in place from today until midnight on Tuesday 21 July.
Using water drawn through a hosepipe for the following reasons are now banned:
Watering a garden
Cleaning a car, motorbike, or van
Cleaning a private leisure boat
Filling or cleaning a garden swimming or paddling pool – except when using handheld containers filled directly from a tap
Filling or maintaining a fountain or domestic pond – excluding fish ponds
Filling or replenishing an artificial pond, lake or a similar body of water.
People should consider doing these activities using rainwater instead.
Aldi is advising customers that its inflatable Ring Paddling Pool and inflatable Jumbo Paddling Pool will not go on sale this Thursday, 11 June due to the hosepipe ban.
Aldi has also decided to cancel all planned upcoming Specialbuys of this nature for the duration of the six-week ban.
Why is this ban coming into effect?
The weather has been extremely dry lately; Met Éireann has said that this was the driest weather in the month of May since 1850. The Greater Dublin Area, Westmeath, Sligo and Tipperary experienced their driest spring on record.
This causes problems for domestic water supplies however, due to an increase in demand for water. For the month of May, people all over the country increased their domestic water use by 20%, Irish Water data indicates.
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During the June Bank holiday, the exceptionally warm saw an equivalent daily increase of water usage for an additional 200,000 people being used in the Greater Dublin Area. And it’s not just a Dublin problem – that trend is echoed across the country.
The dry weather has depleted water levels, with 27 of Irish Water’s 900 drinking schemes in drought and a further 50 in risk of going into drought.
Water levels in Bohernabreena Reservoir, Co Dublin on 5 June. Naoise Culhane
Naoise Culhane
“The last three months, this spring has been one of the driest on record and the projections from Met Éireann is that the dry weather is going to continue,” Niall Gleeson of Irish Water told RTÉ.
Irish Water estimates that a minimum of 100mm rainfall, spread over a number of weeks, would be required to replenish domestic water supplies – normal rainfall levels would be needed after that.
What about the pandemic?
The idea behind the hosepipe ban is to conserve water for more essential activities, like washing your hands, for example.
If you want to use water for gardening, you can save the water used to wash vegetables or dishes by collecting it in a bucket or basin in your sink, or collecting water by keeping a bucket or basin in your shower.
The last hosepipe ban came into effect in July 2018, and was extended several times due to extremely dry conditions. It remained in place in Dublin and other areas until September 2018.
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@Jim O Brien Tech: not an easy or cheap thing to do. There are 10,000′s of kilometres of water mains in our busy streets.
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Watermains commonly are 100 plus years old, have small leaks every few metres at joints and if you fix a big leak the increased pressure just cause a leak down the road
@Eoin McLove: Paying another company/quango just adds even more to what we pay already for more of the same. Irish Water Ltd has already proven this, bonuses, laughing classes to name but a few.
@Jim O Brien Tech: Massive puddle of water in front of the neighbours property here. Leak. It’s been there for weeks. Looks like I will have to ring to get it fixed, neighbours to lazy to do it themselves.
Ah come on, all the rain and flooding during the early months of the year and now a hosepipe ban. It’s a joke, there has to be a way of retaining some of the rainfall in a massive tanks and then filtering it so this doesn’t keep happening. The cost must be what’s stopping us.
@Harry Corry: I don’t know where he works but what he is saying is true. When was the last large reservoir built for the greater Dublin area? The population has grown massively over the years, we need to invest in the planned project transferring excess water from the Shannon to a new reservoir and not have to put up with years of objections and parish pump politics.
@Eoin McLove: No we didn’t get what we paid for. Billions have been handed over to previous governments and county councils and still we have half the water leaking into the ground. No point in throwing good money after bad if we don’t have people qualified enough to manage the funds and the upgrades.
@James Lane: no we don’t. We pay general taxation. That’s all. Your politicians decide how to spend it and that’s based on what you ask for and how you vote for.
It’s a compete lie to say we pay for water through general taxation – you ohhh as well say you pay for the Irish space program or anything else that doesn’t actually get done.
This is not a surprise but merely a other example of the absolute inertia in ireland when it co.es to recognizing problems and dealing with them. We have seen our population boom and not a single reservoir has been added to the system. Even disregarding the obvious changes to weather patterns which we have been witnessing it does not take any kind of genius to understand that more and more people sharing a limited supply of water is going to result in a shortage. We have plenty of rain for most of the year but insufficient storage capacity.
@Ivan Connolly: We do not require rain capture systems for new builds nor encourage retrofitting through grants etc and we have been talking about pipelines from the shannon for ever. This is another case of failed governance by the same people who brought us the children’s hospital and who have made a mess of the Corona virus crisis. And once again we are paying for their incompetence.
@Ivan Connolly: yes the government failed to get it to rain for three months it’s a national disgrace exactly the same as the National maternity hospital.. Jesus wept!!
@John Rock: if Jesus wept we’d be grand, sure that’s where rain comes from ;) the fact is our pop. has been increasing for almost 25 years now and there has been no spending on the kind of infrastructure required to facilitate that increase.
We have had no schools open for the past 11-12 weeks, no hotels, no public houses, no shops other than the major supermarkets, no cafés, no construction, basically everything was shut down. All these major retailers, and businesses who would normally use large amounts of water were and in a lot of cases are still closed. And yet here we are with a major water shortage Must be all the HAND WASHING
@John Doyle: IW website says its a “Conservation Order prohibits the use of garden hosepipes and other non-essential uses of water.”
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Suppose just “hosepipe ban” sounds snappier
THIS IS ANOTHER ATTACK ON OUR CIVIL LIBERTIES WE ARE ENTITLED TO WATER OUR FLOWERS AND LOOK AFTER OUR GARDENS, WE ARE ENTITLED TO CLEAN OUR CARS, VANS, TRUCKS, TRACTORS A BILLION EURO WASTED FITTING WATER METERS THAT NO ONE WANTED WOULD HAVE GONE A MIGHTY LONG WAY IN REPLACING LEAKING LED PIPES THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN REPLACED DECADS AGO… IRISH WATER AN IRISH PROBLEM THAT WON’T FIX ANYTHING…
It’s meant to piss rain for the rest of the week ! Will the ban be reviewed I wonder , phase one maybe Water pistols , phase 2 sprinklers and phase 3 all out paddling pools
Wouldn’t it be great if people did a little bit of rain water harvesting for themselves! They could watch the container fill up, and overflow, when it rains, and as they continue to use the water throughout a dry spell, they could see their little reservoir diminish over a period of time! Dare I say it, it might actually be an education in itself!
@Joe L: I suspect it would and after their little reservoir ran dry a week into the first summer they would realise that to supply their needs for the entire summer they would need to expand their capacity greatly. Now the question is why isnt that little lesson being learned by the people responsible for supplying the nations water needs or the people running the government?
@Ivan Connolly: It is realised. But they don’t care because the Irish voter doesn’t care. Simple.
You cannot CANNOT keep electing the same twits and expect them to perform better. It doesn’t work that way. They’ll just keep doing what they’re doing.
Whens the bonus ban kicking in at Irish Water, seems to me it can rain money all year round at this quango with lovely ad campaign’s and media blitzing to stay relevant
Well Father, you’ve got 4 out of 5 questions right on your specialist subject, William Shatner’s Tek Wars. So, if you get the general knowledge question right, the £500 will be yours. Oh no! People will think this is rigged. John Paul II. What was his name before he became Pope?
IW website says its a “Conservation Order prohibits the use of garden hosepipes and other non-essential uses of water.”
.
Suppose just “hosepipe ban” sounds snappier
Plan for tomorrow not today, no foresight in all aspects of Government. Instead of wasting over a billion on meters they should have been repairing pipes not terrorising home owners over minor leaks.
So you can’t use a hose to fill a paddling pool but you can use the exact same amount of water it would take if you use a bucket? How is that reducing water usage?
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