Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It was great to see the Ceann Comhairle back a few moments ago. I wish him well. I am glad to have the opportunity to speak at this debate this afternoon. I consider there to be two wings to Irish Water. The first is Irish Water "Incorporated" which is very frustrating to deal with and the second is on-the-ground crews that are very helpful in the community.

I will speak about Irish Water "Incorporated" for a moment. It is up there with the National Transport Authority, NTA, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, and the HSE. They are all quangos. It has put a huge degree of separation between central Government, local government and the people. Irish Water is very tricky to deal with and when you manage to get through to it the call centre in Cork does not have on-the-ground knowledge. Staff there could tell you a water leak in Kilrush is a result of a sprung pipe in Meelick, which is 60 miles away. You get ludicrous information like that and Irish Water thinks that is adequate at a time when a community has gone three, four or five days without a water supply. It is not good enough. The call centre is the first point of contact people have with this. It is not fit for purpose and it never has been in the nine years since its inception in July 2013.

On the point around engagement, Irish Water does not engage with local authorities. I do not know what it is like elsewhere in the country but I was a councillor in Clare in 2013 when Irish Water was set up. All of us from the Munster region were brought down to the Rochestown Park Hotel in Cork for a briefing session. Deputy Gould was also a councillor then and attended that day. He came in the back door of the hotel holding placards and thumping his chest and he disrupted the whole meeting. I have never seen the like of it. That was a high-level briefing about the transfer of assets from local authorities to Irish Water. It had to be abandoned. That was the last public meeting the Irish Water hierarchy had with any local authority in open session. Since then the hierarchy has had covert briefings and that is not good enough from a local authority point of view.

I also have huge grievances with the suggestion we should extract water from Lough Derg to serve the greater Dublin area. In 2019 the leak rate in Dublin was 42%. If we bring this grandiose pipeline across Clare, Tipperary and Offaly and all the way over to Dublin we are only feeding Europe's largest sprinkler system. That would be retrograde. It is not environmental or sustainable. It ignores the fact almost half the water in Dublin leaves the pipe network every single day and trickles off into the ground.

There are a few programmes at home I hope will progress. We got good news the other day that the upgrading of the Elton Court sewage treatment plant in Meelick will get underway at the end of this month. This is a key piece of enabling work to allow Ballycannon, which is another housing estate in that community, to connect to the mains system. The system the estate's residents have been living with for years is decrepit and unfit for purpose, so this work is key. Another project is the upgrade of the water mains from Westbury out to Parteen in Clare. Phase 1 of that was done earlier this year and has transformed things. However, there is still a sizable amount of that community, from Larkin's Cross to O'Connor's Cross, that has had 15 outages in the last year alone. There is a quite comprehensive capital plan for this but it needs a nudge and a push. I have been speaking to Irish Water officials again today and those in Clare County Council but I ask the Minister of State to drive that on and help us deliver that.

As a final point, there is a community in west Clare, Glendine, that has a group water scheme which is 28 km long. I have never come across the likes of this before. It is called a daisy chain scheme because there are little splinter schemes going off it left, right and centre. The people in that scheme are facing five days now without water. These are current issues. This is not something that happened last year. I am speaking about villages and parts of Ireland that are currently without water. There is huge ineptitude in the hierarchy of Irish Water and it needs to grasp this. We need more of these schemes to be taken into full public charge and run properly. We should not always be burdening a local committee or secretary with trying to run a massive piece of infrastructure.

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