The Galway water crisis was an accident wiating to happen. And it is a story likely to be repeated inmany areas, writes Liam Reid, Environment Correspondent.
At first sight there are few better places in the world to be than Mountross Bay on Lough Corrib on a sunny April afternoon. As angler Vinnie O'Reilly's boat cuts through the surface of the lake, herons fish on the shoreline, while wild ducks take flight from the reed beds. But as the craft moves closer to the shore he slows the boat down, cuts the engine and brings it to a full stop.
The boat can go no further. It is choked in a forest of underwater vegetation, which blankets the bed of the lake below. Closer to the shoreline a layer of brown scum-like material envelopes the reed beds.
Mountross Bay is showing classic signs of pollution, and the prime suspect is the Headford River, which drains into the bay.
The river carries the almost-raw sewage of the entire town of Headford and surrounding area into the bay. Less than 800m from the overgrown mouth of the Headford River there is a small pumphouse, which has been supplying drinking water from the lake to Headford and its hinterland for a generation.
It came as no surprise to the anglers when the water supply became contaminated with the parasitic bug cryptosporidium.
This treatment plant, alongside the much larger Terryland plant 25km down the Corrib in Galway city, is at the centre of the largest water safety crisis in modern Ireland.
The core issue in the Galway crisis is a simple one. The authorities failed to protect the lake from pollution by human and animal waste containing the bug, then used the same lake to draw drinking water that was not treated adequately.
The crisis has threatened to damage irreparably a tourism business and image Galway has built up over the last 50 years.
The situation has also prompted an acrimonious blame game between Ministers, local politicians and officials over the cause of the crisis.
The crisis appeared to ease during the week, with a decline in new cases and definitive proposals for an alternative clean water supply for the city emerging.
This is promised for the end of June, in time for the main tourist season. But the blame game has continued unabated, fuelled in no small part by the looming general election.
Despite the political hot air, a clear picture is now emerging about how the crisis began. And both local and national Government, along with their elected representatives, have played a role, albeit unintended, in bringing it about.
The only surprise about the Galway water crisis is not that it occurred, but that it took so long for it to happen. More worrying is the fact that it is a story likely to be repeated in many parts of the country.
THE GALWAY CRISIS, now entering its fifth week, has affected a swathe of the county, covering some of its largest population centres, including the city itself and Tuam, 32km to the northeast.
Nearly 200 cases of the human illness from the bug have been confirmed, while doctors estimate the real incidence is probably four times as high as this. A number of people have become extremely ill with the bug and have been hospitalised.
For the 90,000 people in the affected area under "boil notice", it has been hugely inconveniencing. From brushing teeth to cooking, all water involved must be boiled first. Families, especially those with young children and babies, have had to go to tremendous lengths to make sure they do not accidentally ingest the unsafe tap water.
Some families have had to spend upwards of €20 a week on spring water, while the council is now spending thousands of euro on a two-for-one offer of cut-price bottled water.
In the shops and on the streets there is palpable anger about the crisis. "First world city, third world problem" is a common phrase. The impact of the crisis is easily visible. In supermarkets whole aisles are now given over to bottled water. Many pubs and restaurants have posted signs telling customers where their ice is coming from.
During Easter week the city's holy water was sourced from outside the city following concerns about the traditional custom among some of drinking the first draught.
It has brought out both the best and worst in people. Some shops were selling bottled water at cost, while the two-for-one water offer was prompted in part by concerns that some retail outlets may try to profiteer from the high demand for water.
For such a small organism, cryptosporidium has caused enormous trouble.
A microscopic parasitic bug, it is cased in a cocoon-like hard structure called an oocyst.
When ingested by humans, it attaches itself to the intestines and begins to replicate. The body reacts, causing diarrhoea and severe cramps in most people, which can last for at least a week in healthy people. Young children and people with weakened immune systems are at much greater risk and the infection can become extremely serious, causing death in the most extreme cases.
The source of the two damaging strains of the bug, parvum and hominis, are animal and human waste.
Back on Lough Corrib, anglers such as Vinnie O'Reilly have been campaigning for more than a decade about the quality of water in the lake.
"We were treated like cranks," he says of the anglers' efforts to convince local and national Government about the need to protect the lake.
And while measures have been taken, they have been desperately slow. More than 10 years ago, the council and Government promised a new sewage treatment plant for Headford. The plant is only now under construction.
Across the lake in Oughterard there has been a similar waste problem for the past 15 years, but central Government has yet to finally approve plans for the construction of a new facility.
HOWEVER, THE ANGLERSwere not the only people raising concerns about water pollution.
Cryptosporidium was raised as a concern by scientists as far back as 1997. A newsletter published by the Geological Survey of Ireland in May 1997 identified the area around Lough Corrib and the west of Ireland as being particularly at risk of contamination by cryptosporidium.
The reason, the newsletter said, was because of the karst limestone topography of the area, the term used to describe the minimal soil cover over the limestone.
In other parts of the country, soil layers act as a percolator, filtering out contaminants such as animal and human waste before water reaches rivers and lakes.
In karst limestone areas this top layer is non-existent in many places, and the water seeps down quickly into underground limestone rivers and water sources, bringing with it whatever contamination it contains.
Lough Corrib, the largest freshwater lake in the Republic, acts as a drainage basin for a large part of counties Galway and Mayo.
Galway County Council is responsible both for water quality on Lough Corrib and for the sewage plants that pump waste into them.
Jim Cullen, the director of services at the council, rejects the idea that Lough Corrib is badly polluted, pointing to the latest EPA testing, taken at 29 spots around the lake, which show it to be relatively unpolluted.
He is also adamant that the raw sewage from Oughterard and Headford is not the primary source of the outbreak, although he acknowledges that they are likely to have contributed to the contamination.
Instead, the council is now focusing on the Clare River, which flows into the Corrib 16 miles north of where the city takes its drinking water.
Cullen and his staff are working on a theory that very heavy rainfall in the last four months of last year is the main cause of the lake's contamination. The theory is that the river may have flushed through fields and septic tanks carrying high levels of the bug to the lake.
"Normally the Clare River wouldn't be a problem, but it was in significant flood in the early part of this year," he says. "It is inevitable that there would have been a wash or flood of contamination into the lake." Even if the public health debacle was caused by a wet winter, the lack of adequate treatment facilities and slurry and septic tank management remains a problem. Claregalway, a booming commuter town along the Clare River, has no sewage treatment plant.
However, few councillors are willing to criticise one-off housing, over- development or farming practices, all of which have contributed to the contamination problem.
CRITICS, SUCH ASGalway city mayor and Green Party general election candidate Niall Ó Brolcháin, say the council has failed to introduce adequate anti- pollution measures around the lake's catchment region and in the lake itself.
"I have files and files on the water quality issue. It has been highlighted by the anglers for years, but nothing was done," says Ó Brolcháin.
But even if the council was unable to prevent the contamination, the drinking water supply should have been safe.
Even the most modest of treatment plants can deal easily with the cryptosporidium bug through the use of a fine filtration system.
It is a basic standard, but one that the Terryland and Headford plants do not even come close to having.
The Terryland plant, which serves the city, is in fact two separate facilities. The newer plant, which caters for 70 per cent of the city's needs, was built nearly 25 years ago, and has a filtration system that removes the cryptosporidium bug.
It is the older plant - constructed in the late 1940s, and processing the remaining 30 per cent - that poses the problem.
This has only a rudimentary mesh screening system to remove large solids, followed by chlorination. Cryptosporidium is immune to the relatively low levels of chlorination in water plants.
However, as the water from both plants is mixed together, the entire water supply became contaminated. The council in 2005 identified the plant as being at "very high risk" of contamination from cryptosporidium.
GALWAY CITY MANAGERJoe McGrath isn't the "slightest bit interested in the blame game", but he rejects suggestions the council was negligent in allowing the plant to continue operating.
He tells a familiar tale in Ireland of huge growth, which, he claims, made it simply impossible for the city council to keep up with infrastructure.
"We've had a phenomenal growth rate," he says. "We're now the third- largest city in the country. Between 1996 and 2002 the city grew by nearly 15 per cent. Between 2002 and 2007 it grew by nearly 10 per cent." The current population of the city stands at about 72,000.
The council, he says, has provided major projects such as a new sewage treatment plant, and before the water crisis, work was well under way to introduce a temporary water supply so that the old Terryland plant could be shut. "We were working on a solution before this happened."
The Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, has also said he did not want to engage in a blame game on the issue, but last Thursday that is exactly what he did. Speaking on RTÉ radio he said there had been "catastrophic management errors" over the years in Galway local authorities in relation to the water situation. He also fingered local councillors, claiming they had a role in ensuring proper services.
He again mentioned the fact that his department had set aside €21 million for funding a new waterworks in 2002 for the city but the council had not taken up the money.
The Minister neglected to mention that the city council was unable to draw down the money because the Government would not approve the additional staff needed to oversee the project.
In addition, the cumbersome centralised system of local government means that every small capital project must first go through a rigorous approval process overseen by his own department. This process can see plans for water and sewage works pass back and forth between department and council for years.
Attempting to blame the councillors for the mess is also somewhat misleading. It might be unbelievable, but councillors have no approval role in the day-to-day management of capital projects in their local areas. That role is set aside for Roche and his officials.
If Galway were unique, the Government might be able to lay the entire blame on the council and its elected representatives. However, it is not.
Dr Matt Crowe of the Environmental Protection Agency's office for environmental enforcement says the agency is now "very concerned" about the cryptosporidium risk, due to new developments taking place without adequate sewage or drinking water treatment facilities being in place.
"When you have inadequately treated sewage flowing into surface waters, it increases the risk. And when you have inadequately treated drinking water that also increases the risk." The agency has now written to every council seeking to identify the drinking water supplies at risk of cryptosporidium.
Estimates put the number of supplies with rudimentary treatment similar to that in Terryland at one-fifth of all public water supplies.
What is perhaps most surprising about the whole affair is the one glaring issue it has highlighted: despite the unprecedented levels of investment and money generated in the last decade, basic sewerage and drinking water facilities for every citizen are still some way off in Ireland.