Minister for the Environment Dick Roche says he is "delivering on his promise" to Galway in allocating an additional €1.1 million to deal with the water contamination issue.
The funding of €825,000 to Galway City Council and €356,000 to Galway County Council was announced by Mr Roche yesterday as part of a €15 million package of "extra funding" for local authority water services.
However, mayor of Galway Niall Ó Brolcháin of the Green Party has questioned why Galway received the lowest allocation among five major cities, and he has called on the Minister to clarify "who is ultimately responsible" for the current crisis.
Identification of responsibility was also called for during angry exchanges at several public meetings in the city yesterday.
The mayor was commenting on a Department of the Environment document on water services investment, which cites 2006 as the scheduled start date for a €19 million upgrade of the Galway city water supply scheme.
The Minister sparked a political row over the issue last month when he cited 2002 as the date when €21 million had been available for an upgrade - which had not been drawn down as yet.
A spokesman for the Department of the Environment said yesterday that an estimate of €19 million was quoted in a similar document published in 2002, while acknowledging it was listed as at the pre-planning stage.
The spokesman said that Galway City Council had applied in December 2005 for five additional staff to work on the project and was granted two staff who were hired in July 2006. The local authority's recent request for more staff was "being considered", the spokesman said. The Green Party and Labour Party have highlighted staffing issues at local authority level as central to the problem.
The number of laboratory-confirmed cases of the gastrointestinal illness, cryptosporidiosis, which has been linked to the contaminated water, now stands at 191. However, the weekly number of new cases appears to be falling, Dr Diarmuid O'Donovan, public health director said yesterday.
Over 20 people have been hospitalised with the illness, and an additional number of people contracted it in hospital, he told The Irish Times.
The boil water notice must stay in place for the moment, and he pointed out that a similar notice had been issued in Sydney before the Sydney Olympics - and remained in spite of enormous pressure to lift it.
Galway city manager Joe McGrath reiterated his full support for the HSE West stance at a meeting hosted by Galway Chamber of Commerce yesterday which was attended by up to 90 businesspeople, and two councillors - the city mayor, and Galway county councillor Tom Welby (PD).
Michael Coyle, chief executive of Galway Chamber, said that he was "happy with the city council's response", but "not happy that the situation had been allowed to happen in the first place". A "national issue" had been ignored by Government, as was evident in a series of reports warning about a possible crisis, he said.
Paul Gill, owner of the Claregalway Hotel in Co Galway, said that the biggest issue was the mistaken "perception that Galway was unsafe".
About 100 people who attended a public meeting on the issue in Salthill last night heard calls for free alternative water to be provided and funded by central, rather than local government, and complaints about the additional waste accumulating from plastic mineral water bottles. Fine Gael, Labour, Independent and Green councillors attended the meeting.
