Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for being here to listen to our ambitions for the development of wastewater infrastructure throughout the country and water infrastructure in general. We need to be ambitious in how we seek to empower our towns and villages to grow and develop and become attractive places within which to live and work.

We are still dealing with a legacy of a crash that left many homeowners in towns and villages high and dry almost a decade ago. I am sure the Minister of State and many others have been dealing with that legacy and trying to support homeowners who are in estates that are serviced by private wastewater treatment facilities. It is the policy of Galway County Council, and that of many other local authorities, not to take these private wastewater treatment facilities in charge, many of which are now malfunctioning a decade later. Homeowners in these estates, some of which are quite large in towns and villages across County Galway, are left carrying the can. We need to look at mechanisms, some of which were introduced five to six years ago, as to how these issues could be addressed. They are not working. Many homeowners across Ireland are left carrying the can of this legacy at a huge cost. Some of the treatment facilities are simply not working and the Minister of State knows the outcome of that, which I do not have to explain to him. We need to concentrate on supporting homeowners to address these legacy issues in whatever way we can. Irish Water has a significant role to play in that regard, as do our local authorities.

Another issue, which is welcome in one sense, is the demographic challenge of a growing population. Our population has reached 5 million and is predicted to reach many more millions in the decades to come. Our national planning policy is beginning to dictate, from which there are many positives arising, that the majority of our new housing developments should be built in our towns and villages within our settlement centres. The majority of these settlement centres are not set up to accommodate that kind of development. Craughwell is one village in my locality. Its population has doubled in the past decade and the same is expected to happen in the next decade. It is an incredibly attractive place to live and has many fine sports and educational facilities. It is a village close to Galway city. Again, it does not have a wastewater facility. When I inquired with Irish Water several months ago as to what its plans were for the development of a wastewater facility in Craughwell, a burgeoning town, I was told it neither had the remit nor the funds to do so. Craughwell is a perfect example of what needs to be done in the future. Irish Water needs to become far more proactive in providing wastewater treatment facilities to facilitate our towns and villages in the future.

As legislators we have the opportunity to ensure our policies and laws are fit for purpose. If this debate is anything to go by, we have a lot of work to do to protect our water. The most recent EPA report on water quality was published last month and it is not good news. Only about half of our rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal waters are in a satisfactory condition and the overall ecological health of our waters have declined in recent years. The analysis finds the main pressures on water quality agriculture, physical changes such as land drainage and dredging, forestry activities and discharges from urban wastewater. The only good news is that although the number of water bodies impacted by urban wastewater remains high, it is reducing and the trend is going in the right direction.

The number of water bodies impacted by agriculture has, however, increased in recent years and the train is going firmly in the wrong direction. While we have regulations to control water pollution from agriculture, they need to be implemented. I have concerns that these are not being enforced. I fear our water quality will continue to decline in the areas where we have intensive farming with high levels of nitrogen input.

Many of the physical alterations to our watercourses are perpetuated by legislation that dates back to the 1940s. The Arterial Drainage Act 1945 requires the Office of Public Works to maintain water catchments covering about 20% of our country. This amounts to drainage, dredging, bank clearance and the clearing of silt and vegetation in more than 11,000 sq km of rivers and streams with no regard for anything natural living nearby. The effect is to get water to flow more quickly out of the countryside. Ultimately, we are draining our land and rendering it incapable of holding water in times of flood and guaranteeing that the land continues to act as a carbon source rather than a much-needed carbon store. The Arterial Drainage Act should be reviewed. It has been discussed by the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action, which I chair, a number of times and we will publish an important report next week that will address this and other issues.

I must mention the project due to bring 350 million litres of water a day from the River Shannon catchment to Dublin. The project highlights the many failures in how water is managed in this country and we need to drop it and start to think about clever solutions for where the urban growth for Dublin should go. We can and should look at concentrating growth in our urban centres and places such as Limerick, Galway, Cork and Waterford where pressures are not as acute.

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