Dublin City Council has delayed its nightly water restrictions until 10pm in recent nights to accommodate hotels and restaurants holding Christmas parties.
Dublin city engineer Michael Philips told a media briefing on the severe weather conditions that water restrictions were still in place in the whole region.
But in the city, the shutdown was delayed to 10pm from the earlier time of 7pm “to allow restaurants and hotels have a normal supply and to facilitate the number of parties going on at this time of year”, he said.
The restoration of water in the mornings had been delayed from 7am to 9am.
Tomorrow night, the council will return to 7pm to 7am restrictions and review the situation on Monday morning, Mr Philips said.
“Demand has stabilised in relation to our production. What the moment what we are trying to do is build up our storage.”
The council hopes to lift all restrictions from December 23rd to 28th.
Mr Philips said today he believed the weather forecast, which suggests a thaw late next week, should facilitate that.
The capital escaped heavy snow last night, with anticipated snow fall in the east falling largely off the coast, the briefing heard today.
Mr Philips said the capital had a “normal” night with regard to road gritting.
The amount of salt put on the roads was “much reduced”, even compared to a normal freezing night.
Kilkenny county manager Joe Crockett, also of the City and County Managers’ Association, said “very significant resources” were being applied in the west, north west and south west to address the severe weather conditions.
Overnight, Mayo County Council had 17 gritters on the roads doing two treatment runs.
Some 120 tonnes of salt 150 tonnes of grit were used overnight and 70 grit piles had also been established for community use.
In Kerry, seven gritters and four snow ploughs have been deployed and 74 tonnes of salt was used. The authorities there had a remaining stockpile of 270 tonnes.
Major resources had also been deployed in Cork city and county, but the higher parts of the city were “struggling”.
The national primary and principal routes were passable with care, Mr Crockett said.
He commended the “exceptionally good”interagency cooperation between the local authorities, Garda, HSE, Defence Forces, Civil Defence and community groups including the Irish Farmers’Association.
“People have been very resilient, particularly in the rural areas and there have been many lessons learned from the last major weather episode we had last January,” Mr Crockett said.
Arrangements with NRA were “working well” to ensure salt supplies got to areas where they were most needed.
Mr Crockett said budgets in all local authorities were under pressure, but an allocation from the Department of the Environment had been “very helpful”..
It was too soon to say whether further allocations of funding would be required.
“We will know when this weather episode is over what the total bill has been but clearly, people have been working flat out at this stage for over two weeks and there has been a very good demonstration of people just doing their best for their local communities.
“It has been a good example of public services doing what they should be doing.”