Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this most important legislation. Listening to the debate, I think there is a fairly clear message that not enough time is being provided to consider this important Bill. A 45-minute session on Committee Stage next week is not good enough.

On the topic at hand, we are talking about the extraction of water and how we manage and regulate that. We are discussing how we ensure we do not end up with a crisis every so often if there is a drought or a flood. I am sure Leas-Cheann Comhairle knows all about the extraction of water from Lough Corrib in Luimnagh, the amount of water we take from the lake, and the extent of the population served by that water. It serves people from Tuam to Oranmore and right across the area. I find that we are putting a huge amount of effort into purifying the water, but at the other end of it, we are actually polluting the water first.

We have come to a stage in Ireland where we have to decide whether we are going to be serious about how we regulate and how we implement policies. For example, we have a hit-and-miss approach to how sewage is processed in this country. Scattered around County Galway, there is a proliferation of private wastewater treatment plants and housing estates that have been left by builders and developers, who have sold the houses. The residents are left to maintain these systems, to pay for everything that goes wrong with them and to pay for the power that runs them, etc. I believe this is an environmental time bomb that is about to explode on us. Some of these treatment plants are located near our watercourses. In Corofin, there are six such private plants on the edge of the River Clare, which feeds into Lough Corrib. We can talk about levels and everything else, but we must talk about the quality in what we are doing. As Irish Water refuses to take charge of these plants, we are relying on the taxpayer, who has paid a fair penny for his or her house, to actually try to take care of them. It is not going to work into the future. It is not sustainable. We can talk all we like about the issue, but if we look at areas such as Gort in south Galway, we see complicated watercourses, underground courses and so many things going on there. It has taken four or five years to try to understand how flooding occurs, how it rises and falls and where it comes up. All of the swallow holes and sink holes have to be studied. Hopefully, we will not see a serious flood in the area before the drainage scheme is completed there.

The Government is bringing in a Bill that talks about the levels of extraction, the quality of water and registration for extraction. It plans to ram it through in a very short period of time. The legislation is fraught with risk because it will be challenged. We will have a situation where we will not know what is happening until we test it. Deputy Matthews, who is a Government Deputy, has raised a red flag on behalf of the Joint Committee of Housing, Local Government and Heritage by highlighting that the OPLA's advice has not been taken into account. He is asking for a bit of sanity with this Bill.

There seems to be a rush of blood to the head. It seems as if we want to take the EU regulations we are supposed to put in place, tick the box and say, "Here they are". I do not agree with some of the stuff in the Bill. I think it might be over-regulated. Somebody else might agree that there should be more regulations.

At this stage, however, there is too much at stake for our water quality and water supply to try to shoehorn this through the Dáil in the last couple of days coming up to Christmas. It is too serious for that. It is wrong for the people of Ireland that we would do something like that. It is time to call a halt and try to get to grips to see exactly what it means to put in all these regulations. We see what happens with planning and all the layers of bureaucracy we build in when we are doing these kinds of things. They slow down the whole process. We cannot deliver houses, health infrastructure and much of the stuff we need in this country. We must also bear in mind that we have a growing population and we must provide for them into the future. We must provide for a quality of water that can be safe. If we go back, however, we are polluting the water first and then trying to clean it. Let us forget about the levels for a minute.

The town of Craughwell on the outskirts of Galway, for example, is a growth centre for the city and it does not have a municipal wastewater treatment plant yet. Corrofin, Abbeyknockmoy and other places do not have municipal treatment plants. In every one of these places, we have rivers that are flowing and contributing to our water source to feed the water back out. We have got the thing backside over. We need to start off and say let us clean up our act and clean up the water and second, make sure whatever we do is workable and that we actually end up with the right result and we are not just satisfying an EU piece of legislation. I could go on all day but I will leave it at that. Much more time is needed for this Bill, however.

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