What is MCPA?

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How can we all conserve water?

By working together to use only what we need in our homes and businesses, we can all contribute to ensuring a sustainable water supply for everyone.

Keep Reducing Leaks

Much of our drinking water is lost through leaks before it ever reaches your tap. We're working to conserve our water by reducing the high levels of leakage across the country.

Daily we each use 133 litres

Toilet flushing, showering and bathing, teeth brushing, dishwashing, and garden watering. These are the everyday things we use water for, yet rarely think about. But our water resources are struggling to meet demand.

Water Conservation at Home

Water-friendly tips and using water more efficiently:

Don’t leave taps running or constantly dripping: A tap dripping once a second wastes about 10,000 litres of water a year.
Don’t leave tap running while you are brushing your teeth. This wastes around 11,000 litres of water per year.
Fix leaky taps.
Take a shower instead of bathing. Fitting an eco-shower head will use 50% less water.
Use phosphate free household cleaning and washing products. Also, minimise your use of bleaches, disinfectants and anti-bacterial products.
Use dishwashers and washing machines only when fully loaded.

Water Protection and Collection

Don’t pour paints, oils, wood preservatives, solvents, varnish, thinners, pesticides, fertilisers, poisons and acids down the drain. Bring them to the appropriate waste facilities.
Invest in a rainwater harvesting system. This will reduce use from mains supply by 50% as it can be used for watering your garden and plants, washing your car and other household activities.
Flushing the toilet alone uses one third of all water used in the home. You can put a brick or plastic bottle into your toilet cistern to reduce the amount of water per flush.
Washing your Car? Use a bucket of water, instead of a hose.
If you are not on a mains sewerage system. Empty and maintain your septic tank regularly and ensure it is serviced by an authorised company.

Water Conservation

By using the above tips you are reducing the pressure you are putting on the water resources of your area, from which all drinking water must come.

: Last Updated: 25 February 2025

Monaghan County Council are the supervisory authority for all private GWSs in Co. Monaghan.

As part their role, Monaghan Co. Co. take a number of water samples each year from the Stranooden GWS’s treated drinking water network.

During this testing, MCPA was in detected in certain water samples taken in 2017 and 2018. MCPA is a selective herbicide, commonly used in Ireland as a rush killer, but is also found in domestic herbicide products. Since March 2018, Stranooden GWS have carried out weekly sampling on the numerous streams and rivers that flow into White Lough to try and determine which parts of the catchment may be contributing mostly towards the problem.

Why Stranooden GWS?

There are a number of reasons why Stranooden GWS was selected to pilot the surface water aspect of the project. As part of Phase I of the project, each GWS throughout the country that abstracts water from a lake source had their lake catchments delineated. A lake catchment simply means the area of land that drains into a river and its tributaries which then flows into a lake.

Home Use of MCPA

What we have found that Home users have also been using MCPA.

poision in local streams

Remember, water conservation reduces costs

Rainwater harvesting reduces the volume of dirty farmyard water to be managed so minimising the bio-security hazard on your farm. Reducing nutrient losses from your land will increase profitability, since it is wasteful and environmentally damaging to apply more nutrients than necessary. Water friendly farming reduces the risk of contaminating water supplies – your own and your neighbours. Bottom line, a reduction in water pollution will increase water quality, improve aquatic habitats, protect nature, the environment and human health for everyone in your community.