Inishowen had 466 water bursts last year; ‘Lack of investment’ in network slammed

A County Councillor has slammed Uisce Éireann for its lack of investment in water and wastewater infrastructure across Inishowen.

Cllr Fionan Bradley’s comments follow an unprecedented and chronic series of water outages, which have frequently affected thousands of homes and businesses.

There were 466 bursts in Inishowen last year, it has been revealed, while 2025 could be on course for even more outages.

Buncrana Cllr Bradley expressed his deep frustration at the ongoing situation during a recent meeting with officials from Uisce Éireann.

“One of the questions I asked at that meeting was how many bursts occurred in Inishowen last year and how did this compare to the rest of the county,” he explained.

“I was dumbfounded to discover that there was a total of 466 bursts in Inishowen last year, which accounted for 28 per cent of the 1,670 outages across the county. There have been 714 outages in the county this year so far; that’s the fourth-highest figure nationally.”

Cllr Bradley says he has been inundated with exasperated homeowners and businesses impacted by outages – and he’s calling for urgent investment to upgrade the failing water network.

“Given the data from last year and this year, I was expecting to be told that there would be a massive scaling up of the investment in the infrastructure in the county and in particular in Inishowen.”

“Instead, I was informed at the meeting that in 2026, Uisce Éireann intends to replace only 6kms of the 5,000km network of pipes in County Donegal. This is completely and totally unacceptable.”

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Cllr Bradley added: “There isn’t a day that goes by that I am not being contacted by constituents right across Inishowen to be told that they have no water. This summer in particular has been very challenging for the tourism and hospitality sector, with many businesses losing money because they couldn’t open for several days at a time, as they had no water.”

“I will continue to press Uisce Éireann on the necessity for increased investment in the water and wastewater infrastructure in Inishowen," he pledged.