Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Water is a most precious resource. Much has been written about the fact that the next war that will happen on this planet will be not over oil but rather over water. We on this island are notionally blessed to have an abundance of water. As every council engineer and Irish Water engineer will tell us, there is a fundamental difference between water falling from the sky and water arriving treated and potable in our taps.

We should begin by acknowledging that we have failed, as a country, to provide adequate water and wastewater treatment across our nation. The establishment of Irish Water was to be the fundamental shift. We were to have a national utility resourced to do this once and for all. Many of our people are used to going to Spain where there is no rain for weeks and months on end, yet when they go to the beaches they can wash sand from their feet and shower without difficulty. I come from the sunny south east. If we have three weeks of sunshine in the summer, we have no water in our taps. That cannot be right. We need to deal with that historic deficit.

Like others, I would like to deal specifically with the situation in my constituency. I ask the Minister of State to focus on the Wexford town water supply. The most recent boil water notice was issued on 21 October and lifted on 26 October. There was another alert last Friday. This is happening during the peak of the Wexford Opera Festival, where we have thousands of visitors from all over the world yet cannot provide people with a decent water supply without having to boil water. It is shocking. This is an ongoing issue.

As I said, if we have too little rain we have no water in the summer and if we have too much rain the overflow cannot be treated and the water supply is not safe. Too little or too much rain will ensure that we do not have a decent water supply in the town of Wexford. There is a solution to this. We had hoped for an immediate solution in the form of ultraviolet light treatment, but apparently that will not work and more substantial treatment is required. It cannot be the case that 25,000 people are without a water supply or on a boil water notice every second month. The Minister of State is from a neighbouring constituency and I ask him to ensure that the capital provision is provided to deal with this matter once and for all.

The new utility will be a stand-alone entity. Like Deputy Ó Broin, the Labour Party perspective was to allow the elected representatives of workers in the trade union to deal with this and come to their conclusions. There are overarching issues. When a leak on a public road outside of a gate is reported to Irish Water, Wexford local authority workers who are contracted to Irish Water will deal with that immediately and resolve the leak. However, if the leak is on the inside of a gate, under the first fix programme Irish Water will provide a contractor to do the work but it is taking weeks for them to arrive. A leak in the water supply outside of a yard can be fixed immediately but a leak in a yard inside the boundary of the property means people have to wait. In the most recent case I dealt with, with all due respect to the Ceann Comhairle, we had to wait for a contractor to come from Kildare to sort out the problem. I am deeply concerned-----

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