Cathal Berry (Kildare South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to support the motion on investing in our public water and waste water treatment infrastructure. As a proud member of the Regional Group, I am very much in favour of balanced regional development across regional, rural and even coastal Ireland. It is not that I am particularly biased towards living in the countryside; I am just biased towards progress. Living in regional Ireland and supporting the move towards regional Ireland has major benefits to pay for the entire country. It will reduce gridlock, congestion and pressure on services in our main cities. It will also reduce the cost of living because it is much cheaper to live in the countryside. It will further reduce our carbon footprint because we will not have to commute as much. Most importantly and crucially, it will improve our quality of life because we will get to spend much more time with our families and children. We will have a healthier lifestyle and a cheaper cost of living in the country.

I am completely sold on the idea of balanced regional development. To be fair to the public, they are ahead of the Parliament. There has been a major and even a macro trend towards moving towards the countryside, particularly in the past 15 months as a result of the pandemic. As a result of that shift, the Government should not just allow it to happen, it should encourage and support it to happen and even capitalise on this trend. The best way to do that is to make up for the chronic lack of investment in water services, water treatment and other facilities in rural Ireland. I welcome the publication of the recent strategy, Our Rural Future. There is much good context in that strategy document. I accept there have been at least some improvements in road infrastructure and the broadband roll-out is at least accelerating. We are not there yet but it is improving. Water services and water treatment infrastructure are always the poor relation. I am not sure why that is the case. They may be just not deemed to be as sexy, glamorous or as cool as the other technical utilities or it may be the fact that water pipes are under the ground and because they are invisible it is a case of out of sight, out of mind.

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A major infrastructural improvement is required in terms of water treatment facilities. In my constituency in Portarlington, the taps were dry for three weeks last summer. I know it was a dry summer but the main reason is leakage. There is a huge amount of leakage. Many of pipes in the country date back to the Victorian era. We need to improve the piping in our regional towns. There is also a lack of boreholes and wells. There is huge room for improvement from a water facilitation point of view, particularly in a growing town such as Portarlington. Many of the regional towns are rapidly expanding and we cannot rapidly expand unless we provide the facilities required.

I accept there has been improvement and some investment in water treatment facilities, but there has also been a few overflow incidents on both the east and west coasts in the past few months. That is unacceptable. I accept these water treatment facilities are built to EU standards, but we should recognise these EU standards are minimum standards. There is nothing stopping us increasing the spec and the standard of construction to ensure those treatment plants are customised specifically for the Irish environment. Some of those overflow incidents are threatening and compromising the blue flag status of some of our beaches. It is an area we have to improve on.

We need to invest heavily and urgently in our water facilities for a number of reasons. The first is from a climate change point of view. Climate change will bring big changes to our weather patterns. We will have drier summers and wetter winters. We also need to reduce the amount of waste of potable water and the amount of pollution from a waste water perspective. Our population is increasing and the trends are obvious from that perspective. The more people one has, the more water one will need.

Money is cheap now. It is almost free. What better time to invest in our water facilities, be it water treatment plants or water facilitation? It should done as soon as possible to encourage regional development, build houses and invest in our future.

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