The passenger toilet facilities onboard the MV Loch Shira ferry between Largs and Cumbrae were offline again earlier this afternoon (Sunday February 25)

It comes after disruption to the toilet facilities earlier this month which was fixed on Thursday.

Earlier this week Cal Mac issued an explanation for the closure of the customer toilets on board the Largs-Cumbrae ferry which had previously lasted more than a week as travellers had been left crossing their legs due to the fault with the loos on board MV Loch Shira.

CalMac says the on-board toilets have been shut because of a technical issue with the ship's sewage treatment plant, which has been unable to operate in 'automatic' mode.

The system has been operated manually to enable crew toilet facilities to remain in use.

But a further issue with the sewage plant resulted in the last sailing of the day on Monday, February 19 being cancelled.

CalMac's local port manager Allison McDermott apologised to customrs for the disruption and told the Cumbrae Ferry Users Group: "On Monday night a further fault developed that would not allow the sewage plant to operate at all.

"Due to this failure there were no toilet facilities on the vessel for the crew so we had no choice but to take the vessel off service.

"We had initially thought the system would not operate without the new parts from the manufacturer, hence the message that the vessel would be off service until 7.45am.

"But the crew persisted with trying to rectify the problem and found they could do something that would give a temporary fix, so it enabled the vessel to return to service with facilities restored for the crew.

"Things were moving quite quickly, therefore we didn’t want to put out too many messages which could confuse the situation, so we waited until we had something concrete to pass on to our customers."

However, three days after the recent fix, the public toilets are back out of action, with Cal Mac telling customers that 'it should be short term'.