Since 1 January 2014, Irish Water has statutory responsibility for all aspects of water services planning, delivery and operation at national, regional and local levels, including the delivery of water services capital infrastructure, while the local authorities remain responsible for private water supplies.
Under the Drinking Water Regulations 2014, as amended, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the supervisory authority for water supplied by Irish Water. The EPA produces an annual Public Supply Drinking Water Report and Private Supply Drinking Water Report, which provides an overview of the quality of drinking water in public and private supplies. The reports are based on the assessment of monitoring results reported to the EPA by Irish Water and the Local Authorities, and on EPA and Local Authority enforcement activities.
The EPA’s latest report ‘Drinking Water Quality in Public Supplies 2019’ published in July, shows that overall our water supplies are safe, with over 99% of water samples complying with safety limits.
The concentration limit for lead in drinking water is set by the European Union Drinking Water Directive. This is transposed into Irish Law through the European Union (Drinking Water) Regulations. The recently adopted recast of the Drinking Water Directive (EU 2020/2184) will progressively reduce the legal limit for lead from 10 g/l to 5 g/l over a transitional period of 15 years.
The 'National Strategy to Reduce Exposure to Lead in Drinking Water' was published in June 2015. This strategy is to guide actions that will reduce people’s lifetime exposure to lead from drinking water to the lowest possible levels. It is considered that the safest approach to protecting health is to remove lead from all pipework in the public network and from pipes within houses and buildings.
Irish Water is responsible for dealing with lead in the public pipe network. In the period from 2014 to 2020 Irish Water has removed 35,666 lead service pipes. While Irish Water is progressively removing all remaining lead pipes from the public water network over time, in the interim they have put in place a water treatment programme to protect consumers from lead exposure while this replacement programme is implemented.
The Lead Mitigation Advisory Group, which is chaired by officials from my Department, meets to consider and make recommendations on the broader Irish Water Lead Mitigation Strategy and to consider appropriate guidelines and criteria for Irish Water’s decision-making process for lead mitigation measures. The most recent of these meetings took place on 9 March 2021.
Plumbing within a property boundary is the responsibility of the property owner. Based on the most current data, Irish Water estimate that approximately 180,000 residential properties may have some lead pipework.
My Department has introduced a grant scheme to assist owners of premises connected to a domestic water supply with the costs of replacing lead piping or related fittings in homes. Information on how to apply for this grant is available on my Department’s website at the following link:
https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/c3f97-grant-to-replace-lead-pipes-and-fittings/
