New figures reveal that almost 30 per cent of private group water supply schemes in the county had incidents of E.coli contamination in 2006-2007.

According to a new report from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which is due to be published today, of the 36 private group water supply schemes in the county, ten of these had incidents of E.coli contamination. These 36 schemes serve a total population of 3,317.

New regulations introduced by the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government in March 2007 mean that local authorities are now designated as the supervising authorities over private water supplies and Cork County Council acknowledged that there are issues to be addressed with regard to the level of compliance in private group water supply schemes.

It said because the quality of these schemes and in excess of 600 additional small private supplies will now also come within the remit of the new regulations, that there is a significant challenge for the council and the private suppliers to ensure that the quality of private water supplies meets the standards currently being achieved by the councils own public schemes.

The report on the provision and quality of drinking water in Ireland also had good news for Cork county and indicated that there was an overall rate of 97.4 per cent compliance with drinking water standards serving a population of 267,602. This compliance rate is above the national average and is an improvement on the 2005 compliance rate of 97.1 per cent.

Responding to the report, a spokesperson for Cork County Council said while the councils response to the EPA report overall is positive, it did however indicate that there is a significant level of investment required in both infrastructure and systems to enable it to ensure compliance with water Quality Directives and continued high quality water to its customers.

It also indicated that there is an urgent need for a transparent funding system which recognises the full cost of supplying high quality water to both the domestic and non-domestic sector, and the cost which is to be borne by the local government sector for the domestic element.

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