There have been four water outages this week at St Patrick’s Hospital in Fermoy, leading to calls for the Office of Public Works (OPW) to urgently address the situation.

The water pipes failed twice on Monday and twice on Tuesday, leaving the hospital and its 72 patients and surrounding businesses without water for hours.
The OPW has been contracted to fix the 700 metres of water pipe on the Tallow Road as part of the multi-million euro second phase of the Fermoy flood plan.
However, the OPW plans to complete the task down the line as it is not considered priority.
Cllr Tadhg O’Donovan, who is also an employee of the hospital, called on the OPW to address the problem as a matter of urgency.
He said it was forcing the hospital staff to have contingency plans in place to go and fetch water at any stage of the day.
Cllr Noel McCarthy said the hospital staff should not have to worry about having running water and that if a community hospital with more than 70 patients was not an urgent situation, nothing was.
County engineer Noel O’Keeffe said he would apply to the Department of Environment for emergency funding but that he did not hold out much hope as the OPW was contracted to do the work already.