Nearly a million people were forced to drink contaminated water resulting in 52 confirmed cases of illness and several hospitalisations.
Not only did Irish Water fail to issue a boil notice, it did not notify the environmental watchdog and the health authorities until ten days after the incident.
This means that more than 877,000 people were drinking unsafe water in the Dublin area for at least a day and they did not know it.
More than 50 people have been sickened – including some with bacteria linked to E coli and a number of associated hospitalisations.
One incident happened last month at a plant in Wexford which serves Gorey, while a second failure occurred at Ballymore Eustace which is the biggest treatment plant in the country serving large parts of Dublin.
The Environmental Protection Agency described the delays in notifying them and the HSE as an “abject failure” and prosecutions may follow.
Housing and Local Government Minister Darragh O’Brien said he is “pretty angry” at the failures and has ordered an audit of the country’s water treatment plants.
Social Democrats co-leader Roisin Shortall told RTE’s Today With Katie Hannon these are two serious incidents and there will be consequences.
She said: “It is important the public can have confidence and safety of the water supply and clearly there were problems in relation to both of these incidents.
“There are questions to be answered about the procedures that were followed.
“We need to get the facts but, more importantly, we need to know why the proper procedures weren’t followed in terms of notifying the public.
“It’s all very well to say he’s [Minister O’Brien] doing an audit of all water treatment plants… we need to know what happened in these situations.
“We need to know where the breakdown was between Irish Water and the local authority and there needs to be consequences for this. It’s not a minor issue, it’s a serious issue.
“Why were people not informed as a matter of urgency?” Speaking to RTE News, Minister O’Brien told how the audit will initially focus on the 20 largest water treatment plants in the State.
He said: “The water supply is safe in both of these areas but that does not get away from a situation where we’ve had systemic failures in process where public safety was put at risk.”
The minister said the issues arose through a combination of human error and not responding adequately.
He added: “We cannot have situations like this recurring.”
The EPA investigation at Ballymore Eustace revealed the plant produced unsafe drinking water for up to 10 hours on August 20 to 21, but the incident was not notified to the EPA or HSE until September 1.
The probe at the Gorey plant found a power failure and a chlorine pump failure resulted in water entering the public supply without the appropriate level of disinfection.
This went on for around five days between August 19 and 24.
