Michael McNamara (Clare, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I would have said a character in a Beckett play. They say exactly the same things and do the same things over and over, which is sometimes how this works.

As I said, a serious issue underlies all of this, namely, the fact that successive Governments, be they Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, Fianna Fáil and the Labour Party or Fine Gael and the Labour Party - we have not had a Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Government yet - have, for various reasons, not invested sufficiently in our water infrastructure. As a result of that, there are 42 urban areas with no treatment facilities or preliminary treatment only. There are 28 towns with a population of more than 500 people which have no treatment facilities or only preliminary treatment, including a number in Clare, such as Ballyvaughan, Clarecastle, Kilkee, Kilrush and Liscannor. Tourism is key to those towns. Are we seriously saying that in the future we will try to lure tourists to come to Ireland to look at raw sewage being pumped out in the Atlantic, or will we do something about it for the first time? I would like to think we would do something about it.

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