Sir, – Dublin’s water system, built by the Victorians over 100 years ago, is worn out and is now leaking like a sieve. Some 300,000 litres every day is being lost. It needs replacing, not repairing in bits and pieces, here and there.
About 35 to 40 per cent of the total treated in treatment plants at the moment is not getting to people’s taps.
The Shannon/Dublin pipeline, currently priced at €1.3 billion (a figure I have no faith in), is scheduled to provide 300,000 litres a day which, coincidentally, is much the same amount as is currently being lost through leaks in the system ("Shannon pipeline supplying water to Dublin gets go-ahead", News, December 18th).
The €1.3 billion proposed for the pipeline would be better spent replacing the clapped-out system in Dublin which will continue to leak and will only get worse until it is replaced with modern piping.
If your central heating tank was leaking oil at an astronomical rate, would you just buy even more expensive oil to replace the leaking oil? Or would you fix the tank first? – Yours, etc,
DAVID DORAN,
Bagenalstown,
Co Carlow.