Residents in the heritage town of Lismore, Co Waterford, are urgently seeking a meeting with Uisce Éireann after a series of water supply outages in recent months have forced the temporary closure of schools and businesses.

In the past month alone, the town's water supply has failed on three occasions, most recently on St Valentine's Day, one of the busiest trading days since Christmas.

A protest meeting was held two weeks ago, and a decision was taken to ask representatives of the national water utility company to visit the west Waterford town to see first-hand the ongoing problems residents, businesses, schools and a local nursing home are dealing with.

Mark Beer, a member of the newly formed Lismore Water Action Group, says locals in the town have been dealing with significant water supply issues for several years with outages becoming more and more frequent. Poor water pressure and limescale are also causing problems.

"We've doubled the population in Lismore in the last 25 years and due to that the system isn't able to cope. I can't understand why the water quality has gotten so bad but certainly the water pressure has had to drop so low because we have an old system which is trying to feed a town."

Phyl Hannon has run a hairdressing business in the town for the past 27 years. She has never experienced problems until now.

"We don't get any notification at all. I mean you come in, you put on your (hair) colours (on a customer) like the day before Valentine's, and you are talking away and the colours are cooking and you bring them (the customer) back to the basin and there's no water ... I panicked and said what am I going to do?

"And in fairness all the businesses work away together, and Lizzie Brien's across the road gave me a saucer of her water just to rinse off the colours one day, and poor Lizzie had no water herself.

"It is hard to run a business, being out of pocket, letting people down, it is sad really."

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Lizzie Brien agrees. She has run a cafe across the street for the past ten years.

"The schools have had to shut a few times because obviously they have had no facilities and the nursing home, and people's homes, everybody is affected, every house."

The last time they were without water was St Valentine's Day.

"I suppose you could say Valentine's Day is the first big day after Christmas and especially on a Friday, it is even better because you are coming into the weekend and we would have had a lot of orders that day going out, and half didn't get to go out because we just couldn't do it, because when you don't have water to wash your utensils for the baking, for cooking or anything.

"It was just a nightmare, and if you have no toilet facilities you can't operate because of regulations.

"This is coming into the busy season of communions, parties, confirmations, christenings and we have a lot of bookings, but if the water goes off in the morning what do we do, you know," Ms Brien said.

Uisce Éireann acknowledged the challenges faced by the community.

In a statement, it said the town needs "a safer, more reliable and more resilient water supply but this will involve major investment in upgrading drinking water infrastructure", and this will take time.

"We would like to assure customers that when an unplanned outage occurs, local water services crews are immediately dispatched to do repair work as soon as possible."

The Lismore Water Action Group is now seeking an urgent meeting with Uisce Éireann.

Mr Beer said: "We want them to improve the leaks, we want them to sort that out, that is the first thing we want them to do, we want them to increase the water pressure and we want the treatment and quality of the water to be vastly improved, and we want that done as an immediate."

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