Seán Kyne (Galway West, Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister, Deputy Hogan, to the House for this debate. When Deputy Calleary was making his comments a few moments ago, he said nobody had an issue with the €50 registration fee. Unfortunately, the deputy leader of his party, Deputy Ó Cuív, has a problem with it. He threatened to go to jail when it was originally proposed. For the deputy leader of a political party to encourage people to break the law is a very bad starting point for any sort of reasonable debate. The Deputy hoped to be his party's candidate in the presidential election, but he had a bad start during the summer when he encouraged law-breaking and civil disobedience. in addition, Marian Harkin, MEP, promoted herself and got her name out there by suggesting that a €300 charge might be introduced. Such hype, inaccuracy and misinformation were features of the debate in the summer. We are dealing with a legacy issue arising from a European Court of Justice ruling on implementing an EU waste directive. The 2009 programme for Government from Fianna Fáil and the Green Party pledged to implement a licensing and inspection system for septic tanks which they never did.

County Galway has the lake asset of Lough Corrib, much to the envy of the Twenty-six Counties, which provides the water supply for Galway city and Moycullen. From February 2007 until after the Galway Races in early August 2007, Galway's water supply suffered from a cryptosporidium outbreak. This had a huge impact on business and tourism with many people staying away from the city. Even areas such as west Connemara in which the water supply was not affected saw losses of business because of misinformation about the threat posed by the contamination. To be fair to the last Government, it made some progress in opening improved water and sewerage schemes at Lough Corrib, Headford and Clonbur. The Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Hogan, has continued this by providing funding for the Claregalway scheme with the possibility of a new scheme for Oughterard next year.

Deputy Calleary claimed septic tanks played no role in this cryptosporidium outbreak but that is not easy to prove. While I accept the main source may have been the Oughterard water and sewerage scheme, pollution from septic tanks cannot be ruled out either. A small minority of householders have poor septic tanks. I know of a five-year old house bordering a lake which has no septic tank just an outflow pipe.

A grant system will be important to this scheme. I accept it will not be possible to know the level of the problem until after the inspections have been carried out. It is important some reassurance is given that some grant system will be provided for the improvement or upgrade of individual septic tanks, however.

The main issue is the standards and regulations that will apply to septic tank and wastewater systems. If these had been at the starting point of the debate, we might not have seen some of the inaccuracies and hype I referred to earlier. Addressing the standards and regulations would also allay some of the concerns people have about the amount of works they will have to do to their septic tanks.

Earlier Deputy Ó Cuív asked if people would have to buy land to build replacement septic tanks. Planning permission applications for small sites should allow a liberal approach to the regulations to allow a septic tank system to be installed under the site's limitations.

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