Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Regional Group for introducing this important motion which Sinn Féin is more than happy to enthusiastically support. Let me start by saying that the provision of genuinely affordable homes for working people in our towns and villages should be a priority for Government. It is absolutely essential not only for the revitalisation of those towns and villages but also for balanced regional development and, crucially, to tackle the challenge of climate change.

For that to happen, we need increased investment by Government in tackling vacancy and dereliction, a quick and cheaper source of good quality family homes in every county, particularly in every town and village across the State. We must also tackle decade of under-investment in water and, in particular, waste water infrastructure. Before we can rise to the challenge of providing new waste water treatment infrastructure, we must deal with the fact that there are thousands of families living in recently built developments that still are not connected to the public water system. The Minister will know that we have approximately 566 developments, in predominantly rural areas, across the State that were built with developer provided waste water treatment infrastructure, the intention of which was to connect them to the public system. None of them has been connected to date.

This is a legacy issue of planning permission provided during the Celtic tiger, delays because of the crash, changes in policies and improvement in standards in waste water treatment infrastructure developed under the auspices of Irish Water. The difficulty, of course, is that there are thousands of hard-working people who bought homes, predominantly in rural Ireland, and are now at risk of carrying the cost not only of the maintenance of what should be part of the public water system but also the cost if something goes wrong.

We must be honest and say that, in some cases, the developers did not build these waste water treatment plants sufficiently. In other cases, they built them exactly according to the planning permission that was provided by the local authority at the time. It seems that there is a slight shifting of the blame between central government, local government and Irish Water, with, of course, the homeowner stuck in the middle and unsure of what may happen in the future. The Government has allocated funding in the amount of €3.6 million so far this year to remediate the infrastructure in 26 of those estates but that is a fraction of what is required. We need to hear from the Government the timeline within which all of these developments will be brought in charge and their waste water treatment plants brought up to scratch.

Speaking more generally, we hear a lot of backbench Government Deputies bemoan in this House the lack of affordable accommodation in our rural towns and villages and the lack of infrastructure. Of course, the reason those things are the case is because the Government is failing to invest. The level of investment, for example, in ensuring local authorities can bring vacant homes back into stock is derisory. All of the targets under Rebuilding Ireland for tackling vacancy, particularly in our rural towns and villages, have been badly missed. Those targets were themselves very modest. The Government two years ago cut the capital investment programme for Irish Water, crucially limiting its capacity to tackle the kinds of problems that Deputy Naughten rightly raised in terms of those 35 agglomerations that are not only pouring raw sewage into rivers, lakes and seas, but are also currently subject to European Court of Justice and European Commission enforcement which will result in the State paying millions of euro in fines. If the Government wants to tackle this problem, the key is that it must invest in the affordable homes working people, particularly in rural Ireland, need. It must also, and crucially, invest in the waste water treatment facilities to bring our existing infrastructure up to scratch and in charge, as well as provide additional capacity, particularly in those towns in which we want to see greater regional development to take the strain off Dublin and Cork cities, and elsewhere.

The homeowners living in those 566 developments need action, clarity and certainty. This is not a problem of the Minister's making, it is one he has inherited. I urge him to sit down with the local authorities, Irish Water and his Department to come up with a plan so that the people will know when their estate will be upgraded, when it will be connected to the public system and when they will no longer have the fear and uncertainty of having to foot the bill if something goes wrong with waste water treatment plants that, through no fault of their own, cannot currently be taken in charge.

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