Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to be able to stand up in the Dáil Chamber for the first time to speak on a very important subject, namely, Irish Water. There has been a huge discussion about how Irish Water works, how it was established and the waste of money involved in setting it up and we have all heard about this. It has been very well voiced in the public domain in recent years. We must be very careful because there are particular aspects to water which we do not discuss, about which I have found very little discussion. Where I live in Galway East there is a huge number of group water schemes. I heard previous speakers talk about people coming together in communities to resist meters, but in east Galway people rose up together to create momentum to bring water to houses.

I have first-hand experience of having to draw water from the River Clare to our cattle for the summer, when we might have a drought. We had to do it at our own cost. Eventually people got together into groups and created the network to provide a water supply. They did so with the help of public money, but also with a huge amount of voluntary effort. Some of these group water schemes around the country are a model for the way water should be managed by any utility company, but they have been ignored and pushed aside in the whole debate.

One concern I have about water charges and the fact that they may be postponed or whatever is that the people who have been paying for water for the last 40 years are not even being discussed. The whole argument is all about paying for water or not paying for water. Nobody has said to me how these people will be dealt with. Will they get a free allowance or a restoration of their subvention for the group water schemes, which has been reduced? We must consider this matter and have parity in our dealings with people who are getting water in this way.

The second concern that I have in my constituency of Galway East is the issue of waste water treatment plants. We have a plethora of private waste water treatment plants attached to a huge amount of housing schemes in our county. They are managed by the residents and the management companies in these estates. They are paying for the supply and maintenance and must pay for any capital cost to keep them up to standard. This is a huge issue. What will happen in the towns around our county if we do not have some sort of structure? One example I have come across in north Galway, in our village of Milltown, is a scheme designed in the 1970s to put in a waste water treatment plant. That is a good while ago. I was in school at the time. That scheme is only now coming to fruition. The plant will be turned on this month, and for the first time we will have a public waste water treatment plant in Milltown. That has taken over 40 years to bring to fruition. It has been designed, undergone preliminary reports, costed, etc. If that is the kind of delivery we had in the past, I dread the possibility that we might be going back there again.

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