Fianna Fail Achill based Cllr Paul McNamara has queried why a high number of sceptic tanks in the area are failing their inspections.
He told the June meeting of the Westport-Municipal District that he had been made aware of a number of houses that are between 10-15 years old, that have seen their septic tanks fail inspection and that the cost of repairing the systems was very high for people.
Mayo County Council’s Martin Keating confirmed that the council had increased their inspection rate in recent times and said that the council was finding a high number of tanks failing inspection.
He told the meeting that a lot of the reasons for the failures they found was due to poor maintenance of the systems by people - particularly mechanised systems - and people not knowing how to properly take care of them. He also told the meeting that a grant scheme was in place and had recently been changed so that funding of up to 95 per cent to the value of €5,000 was available to people and the income threshold had been removed.
Cllr McNamara welcomed the grant funding scheme - but said that as far as he was aware, the systems that were failing were not mechanical systems. Independent Cllr Johno O’Malley said that he knew the reason why many systems were failing and that was down to “cowboy builders” who didn’t know what they were doing in some cases.
