The Aran island of Inishmaan is hoping for heavy rain over the next few days to ease a water crisis which has hit the community this week, writes Lorna Siggins, in Galway
The Western Health Board has been asked to send an environmental health officer to the island to investigate possible contamination of the remaining supply.
A stomach bug has infected a number of people on the island, including tourists, and there are fears that it may be linked to the group water system.
Mr Pol Ó Foighil, manager of the island co-op, confirmed yesterday that there had been no running water on Inishmaan since Monday morning.
"Inishmaan has had a continuing problem with supply because we have no river and no wells, and our reservoir depends on rainfall."
However, he denied that the group scheme was contaminated and said it had proved to be of "good quality" in recent tests.
He said a wind farm on the island was designed to help fund a new desalination plant which would recycle sea water for domestic use. The plant has been installed at a cost of just over €2 million with the support of the EU, the Department of the Environment, Galway County Council and Údarás na Gaeltachta.
However, he said seaweed choked up the intake pipe for the plant when efforts were made to commission it within the last 10 days.
"The island population of 190 normally uses about 16,000 gallons of water a day, and this shoots up to 40,000 gallons during July and August, when the population doubles due to tourism. We normally ration the water during those months, but we didn't this year, as we hoped that this desalination plant would give us another 12,000 gallons a day."
He said that islanders were using bottled water, but some additional water was available at collection points on the island.
Galway County Council said yesterday that it had not been aware of the problem, nor had it any record of quality problems with the group scheme in the past.
A spokesman said that adequate supply on Inishmaan had been a continuing difficulty and the council had given almost €400,000 towards the desalination plant.
The local authority said it expected that testing would be carried out this week by an environmental health officer. Due to the island location, testing tended to take place less frequently than on the mainland.