Dr. Tom Ryan:

I thank the Chairman for inviting the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, to contribute to a discussion on developments in the water sector in the context of the EPA's most recent reports concerning urban wastewater treatment and water quality indicators for 2017. I am joined by my colleagues Mr. Darragh Page and Mr. Andy Fanning, who are programme managers with senior responsibility in the areas under discussion.

As the committee will be aware, the EPA is an independent statutory body established under the Environmental Protection Agency Act 1992. It has a wide range of responsibilities, including that of environmental regulator of Irish Water. The EPA's regulatory activities include the authorisation of wastewater facilities and the enforcement of those authorisations. The urban wastewater treatment report series provides an annual overview of key compliance findings and recommendations relating to these facilities. In addition, the EPA has statutory responsibility for monitoring the quality of the Irish environment, including the quality of our watercourses and public access to this monitoring information. The water quality indicators report series, which commenced in 2018, is part of the EPA's activities to meet its public information responsibility and it supplements the EPA's more comprehensive three-yearly reports on water quality in Ireland.

The EPA's role in wastewater regulation is to regulate discharges under the wastewater discharge regulations, as amended. While Irish Water, as the authorisation holder, is responsible for complying with authorisation conditions, the EPA enforces those conditions through an annual programme of inspections, monitoring and assessments. To enforce compliance, the EPA uses its legislative powers when necessary, up to and including prosecution. While committee members will note the detailed findings of our urban wastewater treatment report for 2017, I would highlight a number of them. Of the 179 large towns and cities monitored, wastewater treatment at 28 of them failed to meet the required standards set to prevent pollution and protect public health. Raw sewerage from the equivalent of 86,000 people in 37 towns and villages is still flowing into the Irish environment every day. Wastewater is one of the main threats to the quality of our rivers, lakes and estuaries and contributed to poor bathing quality at six beaches in 2017. The EPA acknowledges that these issues have not arisen overnight, that deficiencies exist in many treatment plants and public sewers due to a legacy of underinvestment, and that it is not possible to fix all the issues in the short term. In the meantime, the resources that are available need to be targeted to deliver improvements where they are most needed. In this regard, the EPA has identified the following as the most pressing issues that need to be addressed: the elimination of discharges of untreated wastewater; to treat wastewater from all large urban areas to meet European Union standards; to ensure wastewater does not cause pollution of inland and coastal waters; to improve treatment where required to protect bathing waters, shellfish waters and freshwater pearl mussels; and to rehabilitate or upgrade priority wastewater collection systems. While welcome progress is being made, it is the EPA's position that Ireland is not addressing the deficiencies in wastewater treatment infrastructure at a fast enough pace and, consequently, our health is continually exposed to risk and the water quality of our rivers, lakes and coastal waters continues to be negatively impacted.

The EPA has a statutory role in monitoring the quality of the environment, including a specific responsibility for a programme of monitoring to provide a comprehensive overview of water quality status in Ireland. To this end, we work with local authorities, Inland Fisheries Ireland, the Marine Institute and Waterways Ireland. Arising from this work, and as part of our public information role, we published the Water Indicator Report 2017. Each indicator summarises a particular water quality parameter and presents the current situation and an indication of recent change. The findings include that there has been a net overall decline of 3% in good water quality over the two years 2016 and 2017, and long-term loss of high-quality river sites is continuing, with a further 0.6% decline since 2015. Most water pollution is caused by too much nitrogen and phosphorus entering waters coming from human activities, predominantly farms and urban areas. The increases in nutrients identified in the report are an early warning that we need to address the sources and the pathways by which these nutrients make their way into our rivers and lakes. On the positive side, the report also found that serious pollution continues to decrease and fish kills were at an all-time low in 2017. In summary, the signals in this report are not good and tell us that water quality is getting worse in some areas despite improvements in others. The success in addressing serious pollution and the reduction in fish kills shows that we can make positive changes with appropriate interventions through targeted investment in infrastructure in tandem with improved operational practices.

I again thank the committee for its interest in this important area of environmental protection and the EPA delegation will be happy to take any questions that members may have.