Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to speak on this issue. I have huge concerns about Irish Water. I have fond respect for county council management from the time I was on the council. I salute some of them who have gone on to their eternal reward and some who are still working in it, including engineers, ordinary water caretakers and council outdoor staff and, indeed, indoor staff who did, and who do, a tremendous job. They were and are accountable. Now, the Government is trying to force many of them into Irish Water with no certainty or future. It is totally unfair. I originally opposed the setting up of Irish Water. It is a white elephant and a monstrosity. First, it is lacking in basic knowledge. I met water caretakers who had intimate knowledge of every stopcock, air valve and sluice valve in the systems in the areas. One such person, PJ Cullinan, who is very sick at the moment was a wonderful caretaker as was Joe Carrigan. There are many more. Tommy Hartigan looked after Clonmel as if it was his own fiefdom.

For the umpteenth time this year, Clonmel, the second biggest inland town in the country, is on a boil water notice this week. In addition, there are water outages. Areas of Tipperary are totally neglected, including the Commons, Ballingarry, Lismalin, Moyglass, Fethard, Ballinure and Dualla. We have outages but nobody to report them to. Lay people who are concerned about water tell me that if they call Irish Water on Friday night, they will not get anyone to call them back until Sunday. It is shocking.

While I love the cúpla focal Gaeilge agus is maith liom an t-ainm "Uisce Éireann", this new company being set up will be another failure. First, it is not accountable to anybody. It is not responsible to the elected representatives or anybody else. I am not saying responsible in the wrong way, but it will not come before the Committee of Public Accounts. Who does this Government think it is fooling? Did it not learn from its mistakes when the former Minister, Phil Hogan, wryly smiled and said he would turn down the water to a trickle? The Government will do the same now with the power. It will not be a trickle; it will be an outage. You cannot turn down the power because it will destroy every motor, every dishwasher and everything else. The Government will just turn it off. It thinks it can do this and get away with it. That is what it was inadvertently planning for by closing peat-fired power stations and everything else but I will not go into that debate.

I refer to the whole situation of water in Dublin. I have nothing against the people of Dublin. Many people from my county came to Dublin to live. However, the whole charade of pipeline from the Shannon through Tipperary and several other counties into Dublin is an white elephant. Deputy O'Donoghue mentioned the money ringfenced for Dublin, the water pipe and other Dublin sewerage and water schemes, which will cost €700 million. What would that do for all the villages? I could name 30 of them in Tipperary.

I heard Deputy Connolly talking earlier about very wonderful areas in Galway that I know. They are famous places where there is raw sewage is spilling into the sea. If farmer has an accidental spillage, he is prosecuted and persecuted. It is a charade. The genie is out of bottle. The Government will not stop. The biggest polluters are local authority housing estates but Irish Water does not have the money to deal with them. Many treatment plants are at a very advanced stage of planning, design and everything else but they are all buried because of Irish Water. It could find €10 million to pay in bonuses. What are the bonuses for? They are for being the worst, most inefficient company that ever entered the public realm. Yet it paid out €10 million in bonuses because that is the structure. That is the twisted, pernicious make up of the structure and set up of the company. I know good people who left the county councils when this happened because they were so hurt. They loved their jobs and looking after the people. They were excellent public servants and they just bailed out because of this nonsense, and it is nonsense.

I know one caretaker who is about to retire in two months. He told Irish Water officials he would give them all of the information about the area, which had been handed down from other workers who had retired, but they just laughed at him. However, now they cannot find the valve, the sluice valve and the turn-off point. They are doing more damage with their outages because they are digging and poking around in the dark. Is rud uafásach é sin and it is just not acceptable.

The Minister of State is from the Green Party, which has its ideas. I tabled a Topical Issue matter about the Shannon pipeline. I want to salute Councillor Seamie Morris, Ms Emma Fitzpatrick, who did a report, and others in Tipperary who are opposed to this mad, bonkers plan to pipe water to Dublin from the Shannon and to have up to 47% of it leak into leaky pipes in Dublin. One must remember how the water leaks out. If there are outages and stoppages, all the stuff leaks back in and no one is even thinking about the contaminants coming back into the system. That is a bonkers plan and I raised it here with one of the Minister’s colleagues.

He read out the typical reply from the Minister, Deputy Ryan, today, but then he met me afterwards when we were leaving the Chamber and told me that he 100% agrees with me. The Green Party is all about saving the economy, not building motorways and stopping big projects but this massive project is going to go through the Golden Vale and all the other counties to pump water to Dublin, whereas if the leaks had been fixed, there would be no need for it. The Government had the ideal opportunity to fix the leaks during Covid when there was no traffic in Dublin. Did it do so? Not at all. There is no forward thinking; not an ounce of it.

There is a water treatment plant planned for Clonmel. It has been planned for nearly a decade now. There is a landowner who is willing to give a site. I mentioned him previously. Jimmy Harney pursued that project and got it to a certain stage. There is still not a sign of it, though. It was going to take water onto the farm of Donal Lyons, who has agreed to sell the site and has seemingly signed contracts but there is no sign of it happening. That would provide for the town of Clonmel, where there is industry and households that have to put up with boil water notices and outages every week. I could go on to mention most of the towns in the area. The situation is the same in Carrick-on-Suir. Those towns have treatment plants, but what about all the villages, including my own village of Newcastle? We cannot build a henhouse because the treatment centre is not a treatment centre; it is a big septic tank. I can keep going. Burncourt, Lisvernane, Bansha, Monard, Solohead - anywhere you want to go; they are all there. Some of them do not even have tanks. It is disgraceful. The Government brought out a mockery of a septic tank grant which could not be assessed. One had to do the work first. It was only seven or eight or ten sites in south Tipperary and maybe ten more in north Tipperary that were even tested. It was all a big PR message. In Golden village, there is raw sewage spewing into the River Suir. It is one of the best river salmon and trout fisheries that we have, yet raw sewage is spewing into it every hour of every day. The Minister of State knows the consequences of that but we hear the talk from the Government about a green and clean environment and making people freeze and be without light and making industry be without energy this winter. All this patent nonsense is going on as well.

I want to salute recent retirees from Tipperary County Council who did tremendous work. Two former directors of services, Pat Slattery and Clare Curley, were fine public officials. A number of engineers, including Willie Corby and Eoin Powell and others are retiring now after many years of service. I thank them and wish them well. They will be a huge loss to the system but the system does not care any more. Irish Water does not want to know the county councils. I ring it regularly. I also want to thank the plumbers and the supervisors, such as Pat Fitzgerald and many others whom I have to contact because you might as well write to Santa Claus as try to phone Irish Water. There is no information. It is like an answering service. They do not know what county you are in, not to mind what parish you are in. It is a shocking situation. I know of people who will ring Irish Water about a major burst pipe that will do huge damage to the road as well as being a waste of water but they cannot get through to anyone. They ring the Garda and it tells them to ring their public representative or to ring me. That is the way it has gone. It is patent nonsense.

The Government is now going ahead with this without proper legislation or proper scrutiny mechanisms to make sure the company will be accountable to somebody, there will be audits and it will be accountable to the Committee of Public Accounts for the waste and the way they waste money. I am appealing to the Minster of State, as a green Minister, to stop this mad and devastating project that is going to destroy the flora and fauna and the landscape for all that distance just to pump water up here for it leak it into the ground. It is patent nonsense.

As I said in a debate last night, it is the men in white coats who should be coming to take ye away. The Government needs to fix the leaks in Dublin. I have nothing against Dublin people. They are entitled to clean water. During the drought this year, we did not have enough water at Ardnacrusha to keep our plants going but the Government is going to pump that much water up to Dublin for it to leak. It is nonsense. It is bonkers and a failed decision by previous Governments. I do not know why the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, and their colleagues now acquiesce with this project and keep it going, but it is not going to be a reliable source because the water is not there. Dublin has heaps of water at Poulaphouca. There are plenty of bore wells that can be sunk in Dublin to supply the city and its people and give them plenty of water. It is just not acceptable that the Government has kept this project going.

As I said, Emma Fitzpatrick has done a tremendous report on the situation. That report is there to be debated and examined and is available for independent scrutiny. It lays bare the fallacy and the nature of the concept of the project the Government is doing, as well as the figures. The figures will triple. It will be like the children's hospital - another runaway money train with no accountability.

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