Ms Mary Gurrie:

As the Deputy knows, local authorities are primarily responsible for bathing water quality. They undertake the monitoring and management of beaches during bathing water season. The EPA has an oversight role in terms of classifying bathing waters and publishing an annual report on their quality. We also manage beaches.ie, which provides up-to-date information.

Overall, Ireland's bathing water quality is good and we have a large number of excellent beaches in terms of water quality, but all of our beaches are susceptible to pollution events, particularly after heavy rainfalls, from wastewater, animal run-off or other factors. For example, misconnections can often be a problem. In Dublin Bay, Merrion beach was unfortunately declassified a number of years ago and Sandymount was at poor water quality status for a number of years. A task force involving the local authorities, Irish Water and some other stakeholders, such as the HSE and the Department, has been set up to examine the problem, get to its root causes and put solutions in place. That has been progressing in terms of identifying the causes of the problems that are impacting on bathing water quality at those beaches. I hope that we will see quality improve over time. We have many beaches in Dublin that have excellent water quality, which is great to see, and it is important that we maintain and protect them, try to reduce the number of incidents and manage them when they do happen so that the health of bathers is protected.