Hundreds of houses are being built and are continuing to get planning permission in villages and small tourist towns in Co Kerry without proper sewage treatment facilities, it has emerged.
Kerry County Council yesterday admitted that the infrastructure could not keep pace with the area's boom in development.
It was council policy to develop villages in order to curb one-off rural housing in the countryside.
However, €112 million was needed to bring water supply and sewage schemes up to scratch, engineers from the water services department said.
The Department of the Environment was more interested in funding new water treatment plants and supply schemes rather than upgrading existing ones, Mr Colm Mangan, senior engineer in water services, explained.
Hundreds of thousands of euro would have to be spent by the council on stop-gap measures until new plants could be built.
In the heritage town of Kenmare, rated as one of the most desirable places to retire to, the bathrooms of 76 houses at Tubrid look directly on to the sewage plant, but they are not connected to it. In the next year, 150 new houses will be built in that area, but the town's sewage system will not be able to take the development.
Consultants are being appointed to look urgentlyat what short-term measures can be taken for Kenmare to see it through next summer, when hundreds of thousands of tourists add to Kerry's fastest-growing town.
Almost 3,000 houses were given planning permission in Kerry in 2002, many in the county's villages. Of these, almost 2,000 were for full planning approval. (The numbers do not include the major towns).
Mr Michael Cotter and his wife, Antoinette, moved into their new house in Firies village in mid-Kerry last May.
During the summer they had to live with intolerable smells and swarms of brown flies. They feared for the health of their twin four-year-old boys.
Raw sewage was escaping into the nearby stream.
Once a week a tractor arrives to clean a small oil tank that serves as the village sewage treatment plant.