Sewage spill data in Ireland: what is and is not published

Why there are no spill markers on Irish beaches

This site draws its discharge layer from water companies that publish a live storm overflow feed. No such feed exists in Ireland, north or south. So when you open an Irish beach here you get no discharge data at all. Northern Irish pages also read Not classified, because this site does not carry DAERA's annual ratings.

The Republic: overflows are assessed, not counted

Uisce Éireann runs the public sewers. The EPA licenses and enforces the discharges. In its report Urban Wastewater Treatment in 2024, published in 2025, the EPA puts the number of storm water overflows at an estimated 2,469. It requires Uisce Éireann to assess every one of them against national standards set to limit pollution. The EPA says overflows should only discharge in extreme rainfall, and should not activate in normal conditions to compensate for a lack of sewer capacity. By the end of 2024, 2,184 had been assessed and 238 were found not to meet the standards. Another 285 assessments were overdue.

That regime asks whether an overflow is built and behaving to standard. It does not record each spill, or its length. There is no published equivalent of England's event duration monitors. Uisce Éireann's open data catalogue holds eight datasets, none of them about spills.

What the Republic does publish

beaches.ie is run by the EPA. Local authorities take the samples and issue the notices. Two notices tell you not to go in. An advice against bathing warns of a health risk, and a bathing prohibition means swimming is not allowed. A third kind, the prior warning, goes up when heavy rainfall is forecast at a beach known to be affected by it. The EPA says these warnings nearly doubled in 2025. No notice showing is not the same as no problem, because a notice follows a sample or a forecast.

Samples are taken at least once a month during the bathing season, which runs from 1 June to 15 September. The EPA puts the lab time at 21 to 24 hours for E. coli and about 48 hours for intestinal enterococci. So the newest result you can see may be weeks old, and it only ever described the moment the sample was taken.

In 2025, 150 of the 153 identified bathing waters met or exceeded the minimum standard and 120 were classified excellent. Dún Laoghaire Baths was classified poor. Read those as a record, not a reading. A classification is worked out from four years of samples, so it describes how a beach has behaved over time. Excellent beaches still get short-term pollution.

Northern Ireland: the monitors exist, the live feed does not

NI Water runs the sewers and DAERA regulates the bathing water. NI Water reports 2,441 storm overflows, of which 466 had a working event duration monitor as of May 2026. That is about 19 per cent. Around 1,000 are planned by 2028, which NI Water puts at roughly 40 per cent coverage. The first went in on overflows spilling into the 33 designated bathing waters, 31 of which now have one.

So monitoring exists in the North. What does not exist is a public live feed. NI Water publishes a map summarising spill counts and durations for the 12 months ending 31 December 2025, and says that data is under review and may be updated. A monitor records how often an overflow spills and for how long, never how much came out.

What Northern Ireland does publish

DAERA runs a bathing water dashboard with weekly sampling results and a profile for each site. It states plainly that results are not real time, and it tells you to avoid bathing during or up to 48 hours after heavy rainfall. Water quality is assessed on 20 occasions a season. Of the 33 sites, 24 were classified excellent, five good, three sufficient and one poor, announced on 5 November 2025. DAERA works those out, where it can, from four consecutive seasons of data, so like the Republic's they describe a record rather than the water on the day you are reading.

What the gap does not tell you

A gap is not a clean bill of health, and it is not evidence that Irish water is dirtier. You cannot see. You have the sample results and any notice in force, and a classification where one is published. You have nothing about what the sewers did last night. Both regulators point at the same thing, heavy rain. Treat that as a reason for caution rather than as a measurement of the water. It does not work the other way round. Dry weather is not an all clear, because spills, farm run-off and yesterday's pollution do not show up in today's forecast.