Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We are getting 45 minutes to consider amendments to a technical Bill. The Government often blames committees, arguing that it takes them too long to do pre-legislative scrutiny and that is why there is a rush at the end. Our detailed, considered report has been with the Government for two years, yet it is only now that we are getting to debate the Bill, with only a tiny amount of time provided to discuss what will no doubt be a significant number of amendments from a number of Opposition Deputies. I mean this with no disrespect. I thank the Minister of State for thanking the joint committee for its hard work in doing the pre-legislative scrutiny. The problem is that the Government has not included in the Bill any of the key recommendations in the pre-legislative scrutiny report. Thanks are all well and good but we would much prefer if the Minister of State’s party colleague and his officials listened to us and the key recommendations we made. The thresholds are wrong. I will return to that in a moment. The registration threshold and the licensing threshold are not low enough and that will come back to haunt us.

There are real problems with the level of compliance in the Bill with a range of legal obligations, including the environmental impact assessment, EIA, directive, the water framework directive, the Aarhus Convention and others. There are also legally questionable sections in the Bill in terms of exemptions and the possibility for people to continue abstracting large volumes of water with licences, even where it has been shown that such abstraction is causing significant damage to the water quality and, ultimately, to communities, businesses and the environment.

The Minister of State will not know this but one of the significant things the committee did was to ask the Office of Parliamentary Legal Advisers, OPLA, to give its view on the level of compliance of this legislation with our EU legal responsibilities. The OPLA’s report was really damning. It is very rare that our committee has made such a request when we do so, the OPLA is often very cautious in its report. The Oireachtas has a right to know in summary form what that advice was.

On public participation, the OPLA’s advice was that with respect to the relevant section of the Bill, while the language of the EIA directive is being used, it does not appear to be in compliance with the public participation requirements of the directive. That is with respect to the general scheme but I see no change in the Bill itself. The advice referred to the thresholds, one of the central weaknesses of the Bill. It described them as being arbitrary and solely based on size and stated that they prevent environmental impact assessment for existing abstractions to occur below 25 cu. m and proposed abstractions below 250 cu. m which, in the view of the OPLA, the European Court of Justice had held to be contrary to the EIA directive as well. Over again in its advice, the OPLA listed instances where it genuinely believed that this legislation, albeit in the general scheme, was not in compliance. Again, because we will have such limited time, it will be virtually impossible for us to have an exchange with the Minister to allow him to convince us that the very serious legal concerns the OPLA had with the general scheme have been satisfied in the Bill. It will be virtually impossible to do that in the short time provided.

What is the problem with the thresholds? Let us picture what we are talking about here. What is 25 cu. m? I think that people would like to know what it is because 25 cu. m does not mean much to most of us. It is the daily usage of water of 2,250 people. We are saying that below that amount, there is no requirement to register. Registering is not complicated. It is done online in the North where the threshold is 10 cu. m, which we recommended in our pre-legislative scrutiny report. It is very easy, administratively simple and there is no cost to register.

The licensed threshold is 2,000 cu. m, which is the daily water usage of 18,000 people. What we are saying is that where less water than that is being used, say the daily usage of 17,000 or 16,000 people, there is no licensing requirement whatever. That is beyond belief if we want to be compliant with a directive which is about the proper management and maintenance of the quality of our water for all of us – human, animals and ecosystems – that depend on it.

The worst aspect of this is that the proposal in our pre-legislative scrutiny report is what exists 90 miles up the road. This has been in existence in the North of Ireland, Scotland and many other European jurisdictions. If it could be done up there and was good enough up there, then why not here? Would it not make more sense for us to have a single abstraction regime with single thresholds North and South? The fact we do not have that is deeply concerning. Registration is just registration; it is the licences that are the key. I note the Minister of State did not indicate how much water will be covered by the licences as a percentage of the total amount of water in the State because that is the figure that is really important.

The idea of providing indefinite licences is enormously problematic. Surely there should be mechanisms for review and withdrawal of licences if the proper management of our water system requires it. The idea of full transposition of the environmental impact assessment directive and retrospective environmental impact assessment definitions on existing large-scale abstractions is absent from the Bill and hugely problematic.

I could be wrong on this too, and I look forward to the Minister of State correcting me at any stage if I am, but there is no provision in the Bill to refuse a licence application from an existing abstractor, even if there is clear evidence from the Environmental Protection Agency that such a refusal would be the most appropriate course of action both for the protection of our water system and compliance with the directive.

The other major issue the committee addressed was the resourcing of the Environmental Protection Agency. It is an organisation for which I have enormous respect. It does very important independent work and regularly sounds the alarm at the Government’s failure to properly manage all aspects of our water system, from the natural water courses and river basins to our drinking water and wastewater. It was patently clear to the committee that it does not have the resources to even administer the limited scheme before us today. If we are serious, 22 years after the introduction of the European directive designed to assist this State to improve and better manage its water courses, we need to ensure the EPA has adequate resources. That is not just staff but also powers of enforcement. I got the impression from the EPA that its big concern was that if this legislation went any further than what is currently being proposed by the Government, it would be overwhelmed. That is not a reason not to go beyond this legislation but it is a reason to ensure we not only amend the thresholds and the other technical aspects of the Bill but also give the Environmental Protection Agency the resourcing and powers it needs to do a very simple job, namely, to properly protect and promote the quality of our water so that communities, businesses, nature and our ecosystems are properly protected and improved. This Bill does not do that.

We will not be opposing this Bill but we will right tooth and nail in the 45 minutes the Government has given us to try to improve it. The Minister of State should rest assured that this issue will come back to the Oireachtas in the future. It may be after this Government is gone and another Government is in its place but this battle is not over and it will continue until we get this right.

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