David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Helvick is a working sea fisheries harbour in the west Waterford Gaeltacht. It also hosts an RNLI lifeboat station that serves the bay of Dungarvan and the surrounding coastal zone. A build-up of sand and silt in the harbour has resulted in it becoming inaccessible and unnavigable at low tide. Fishing boats can neither enter nor leave the harbour, except at high tide, and the lifeboat is on restricted service. This means it cannot launch for 90 minutes each side of low tide, which equates to approximately three hours out of every six and a half hours. Necessary dredging has not occurred because of the prohibitive costs on the local authority to self-fund preliminary surveys and environmental assessments. Until dredging is carried out, lifeboat services will continue to be restricted. In the words of one RNLI worker, it is only by pure luck that the lifeboat has not been tasked to an emergency by the Coast Guard during these restricted service times up to now. Not only is the situation affecting the ability of fishers to earn a living and to carry out their work safely, but it is actively putting lives at risk at sea. I do not want to have to raise this matter with the Minister of State again in the wake of a tragedy at sea where lives have been lost due to the inability of a lifeboat to launch.

The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine can provide funding for dredging. This is important and necessary funding. I welcome the funding that the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine made available for a number of different harbours in County Waterford over recent months. All of that funding is necessary. However, funding for dredging does not cover the preliminary work, that is, the surveys and the environmental impact assessments that are required to be carried out before dredging can commence. The cost of this work can often be as high as the cost of the dredging itself. This is placing local authorities in a catch-22 position. The Government will fund them to dredge harbours but will not fund the preliminary works it requires them to undertake to be allowed to dredge.

I am sure, because I have been here before, that the Minister of State will say that local authority funding is a matter for the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage and that funding for day-to-day activities such as surveying and assessment is also a matter for that Minister. I have heard that before. However, when I talk to the chief executives of local authorities, they say they do not have the funding. As the Minister of State will know, they have very tight resources when it comes to their core funding. They simply do not have the ability to fund the necessary preliminary works. All of this ignores that those surveys and assessments are not budgeted for anywhere and must come out of the local authorities' overall budget. I am sure Members of this House who were councillors before arriving here will know that, if the local authority in Waterford was to provide funding for these preliminary works without that funding coming from some other source, other very necessary services in Waterford would have to be curtailed to make way for funding for these surveys and assessments to be made available. In other words, the funding would have to come out of the local authority's budget.

Will the Minister amend the regulations and expand the funding stream to cover the pre-dredging surveys and assessments to allow local authorities such as Waterford City and County Council to carry out the dredging works that are so urgently required?

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