There is a potential risk to public health from unmonitored private drinking water supplies.

Today's EPA report reveals there was an increase in the number of private group schemes with E. coli failures last year.

One in twenty of these schemes failed to meet E. coli standards.

EPA Programme Manager Noel Byrne said firms with a private well need to get registered or else there is a health risk. 

“What the EPA report highlights is that many businesses that have their own well are not registered with the local authority,” he said. 

“If they’re not registered with the local authority, they aren’t being monitored by the local authority and this is creating a public health risk for consumers.”  

Mr Byrne did commend Cork for the “very good job” it has done registering private wells. 

“They’ve greater than 350 registered but if we look at similar size rural counties - such as Mayo - they’ve actually less than one tenth of the amount that Cork have registered,” he said. 

“So, you can see there’s a significant gap there.”

Local authorities are required to maintain registers and Mr Byrne urged them to be more “proactive” in this area.

Main image: A well in County Louth. Picture by: Alamy.com