Ballyloughane Beach will be again open for swimming next summer, after its water was given a status of ‘excellent’, following recent tests.
Throughout the 2021 bathing season, which officially came to an end last week, 18 tests were carried out at the beach, with 17 declaring the quality of water to be ‘excellent’. The August 9 result was ‘sufficient’, and followed a period of heavy rain, conditions that have in the past led to poor results.
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Ballyloughane Beach had been effectively closed for six of the previous seven summers, as a result of water quality there being classified as poor. However, Improved water sample returns resulted in the beach being declared officially open this summer.
Independent Galway City East councillor, Terry O’Flaherty [pictured below], said she was “delighted” by the latest results. “Ballyloughane will be fully open to locals and visitors again next summer,” she said. “We have put behind us the years of swimming bans due to a number of tests showing the water to be not of sufficient quality.”
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However, she wrote to the Environmental Protection Authority, questioning why, in a number of the years when the beach was closed, one poor result out of a whole summer of otherwise positive water quality tests should have condemned the beach to closure the following year.
“From 2012 to 2020, out of a total of 125 samples taken at Ballyloughane, only nine of them were ‘poor’,” she said. “The majority, 89, were ‘excellent’, 21 were ‘good’, and six were ‘sufficient’. Very similar results over the same time span for water at Grattan Road beach had not led to its closure for any summer.”
