Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party)

Everybody would support the idea of improving water quality and upgrading septic tanks but the issue before us is the way it will be done and who will pay for it. The Government can dress it up any way it likes but rural dwellers know that what is going on here is the use of an environmental cover or the threat of the European Union to bring in a new stealth tax. The proof of that is that there are different methods of dealing with this issue in other EU jurisdictions.

The Bill proposes legislation to enable the inspection of septic tanks and a registration process. The first question I ask the Minister is why we need a registration process. Local authorities have all the information and know all the houses not connected to the public sewer. They know the houses that dispose of their effluent by way of cesspit, septic tank or package treatment plant. If the Minister does not need a registration process to give him that information, why does it exist? The only explanation is to get the principle of a charge established so it can be increased in future. I do not believe any of the rural dwellers will fall for that or the idea that it is only €50 or that the registration will only take place every five years because experience tells them that once a charge such as this is imposed, it will be bedded down and will rise again relentlessly.

Local authority water services staff are already capable of compiling all of the information required regarding the type of systems in use and the associated percolation areas but this Bill proposes to cut them out of the process and set up a new inspection service at a cost of €1,000 per inspector under the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA. The only logic for that has to be that it is part and parcel of a plan to privatise water services, which will inevitably lead to higher charges on householders already stretched to the limit.

It is a bit rich to hear Fianna Fáil Members banging the drum on this issue when they, along with their colleagues in Fine Gael, were responsible for many of the planning decisions taken, often against planning advice, which contributed to a situation where the systems in many houses will not be compliant. The figures used from areas such as Cavan and so on show 25% non-compliance but the figures are likely to be higher than that. The remediation and replacement costs of approximately €4,000 are a little low, particularly when we consider that percolation tests alone to determine suitable soil and water tables could cost up to €1,000.

This is an enormous burden to put on people who installed systems at their own expense, paid levies to county councils to avail of services and so on. Taxpayers in rural areas can feel justifiably hard done by that billions of euro have been spent on upgrading the public sewers in past decades yet they are expected to shoulder the cost of this remediation.

It is ironic that in my area the Minister proposes to spend €2.5 billion on upgrading the public sewer, including installing a major new wastewater treatment plant on rural dwellers' doorsteps to take effluent from seven local authorities, yet the people living beside it are expected to pay again for their own septic tanks.

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