Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We were all very complimentary earlier on tonight on the Bill regarding maternity and many other pieces of work that the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, has done before he took over his position, but this is crazy. As I said last night to the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, Deputy Fitzmaurice called them “Bills”, but I am calling them “Acts”. The backbenchers were boasting that the Minister, Deputy O’Brien, had brought forward 22 Acts, but he is not in the Gaiety Theatre or the Abbey Theatre. These are the Houses of Parliament where we are supposed to have proper scrutiny of legislation. It is like John Wayne in the old westerns. They should not be notches on your belt. This is gung-ho. This is crazy.

With the indulgence of the Leas-Cheann Comhairle, my late father-in-law, Nicholas Sherlock was chairman of the Tydavnet group water scheme in County Monaghan, with Seán Clerkin. It was one of the biggest, most successful schemes serving more than 600 houses. I know I am cutting short, but it was a wonderful scheme and they still have control over it but they are not being respected or supported at all.

Irish Water, Uisce Éireann, Ervia - call it what you like and give it new fancy Irish names - is running amok and doing what it likes. In deference to Deputy Fitzmaurice I have problem with pumping water from the Shannon to Dublin when there is 48% leakage. The leaks should be fixed first. I am not anti-Dublin at all but we have a huge issue with water. I said here this morning during another debate which was 12 hours ago or more, when we were speaking about climate change that I remember as a buachaill óg breaking ice on the ponds before the cows went out from the cowhouse after being milked. I broke it with sledges, which were 7 lb or sometimes 14 lb and we could hardly lift them. They were needed to break the ice because they were so thick. We are being attacked and indoctrinated in all measures in that way as well. Irish Water has too much control. We have clean rivers and streams.

We all want clean water. I fully agree with Deputy Fitzmaurice in that we take the water from source and pump it to the treatment plant, costing a fortune. Of course, Irish Water is free to everybody except businesspeople and farmers. The cost of water was never explained in that debate with "Big Phil" the enforcer, as I called him at the time, the then Minister with responsibility for water, Phil Hogan. The cost of extracting it, pumping and treating it and then pumping it on and maintaining the service is enormous. There is no such thing as free water. I used to get water with my older brother, using a horse and cart and pumped from the side of the road into barrels, to be given to cattle during a heatwave. It could not be done at times. Water is a valuable resource and it is great to have it, but it must be respected.

Irish Water cannot get all these powers and the same is true of the ESB. The Minister of State knows much more about what goes on in the Shannon than I do, given I only hear about it when I pass through and see the flooding, and when Kevin "Boxer" Moran was Minister of State, I listened to him talk about it. With the way the river is maintained, with the levels, the dams and so on, the farmers suffer. Instead of the carrot and stick, we all the time seem to use the bata mór. We are demonising farmers. It is very odd at this stage to find a careless farmer who might have slurry spills, wastage and that sort of thing. No farmer is going to spread slurry on a wet day. It is all calendar months now, which is crazy. It should depend on the conditions as to when a farmer spreads slurry, whenever he or she wants to do it to get the maximal benefit without run-offs. They do not want to have run-offs. Now, there are calendar months and it is all EU decisions. We need a special office to be set up here for BS detection in respect of what comes from the EU, and I will not describe what I mean by "BS" because most people will understand it and it would be unparliamentary of me if I did. It is shocking. Every farmer should be able to get water from the river passing by the land and use it. It is not long ago that cows, bullocks, sheep and the whole lot stood in the river and drank from it. My son farms sheep on the Knockmealdown Mountains. Those sheep get their water from the little streams, they are happy and they graze, and they are the finest sheep you will find.

One day, a man came into my office in Clonmel and said he and his brother had made their living out of catching eels in the River Suir and selling them to The Clonmel Arms. Unfortunately, The Clonmel Arms is now a derelict building, which I mentioned earlier. Now, the man said, there is not one eel in the River Suir. There is a brand new treatment plant like that in many other towns and the water is crystal clear, but what the hell are we treating with, given there is no vegetation or eels or anything else in it? Are we doing more harm than good with the filtration process, what we are adding to the water and the ingredients that go into it at those treatment plans? I think we are. Something has changed if there is not an eel, a trout or any other fish in the river south of those treatment plants.

Damage and pollution is being caused by villages. In my county, I could name 30 villages that have spewed raw sewage into rivers, and the EPA is supposed to be a monitor. I met its representatives one day at the River Suir in my village. They were checking things, and I asked whether they would not move 200 yd downstream. There was a full outlet pipe from a big tank. It was an ordinary thing with no treatment, belching into the river. People are sick and tired of this. It is all stick, punishments, labelling and licensing for farmers, and the EPA is turning a blind eye to the biggest polluters of all. It is happening on the coast here in Dublin, in other cities and in many other places, and we are losing our blue flag status and everything else.

My family are traditionally potato growers and there were a couple of dry summers in recent years when they needed large volumes of water to irrigate the land. I swear to God they could not get it out of the river. I am not saying they were going to drain the river dry and leave no water for the fish. They are not reckless, but they could not get water there without a licence and permission. Deputy Fitzmaurice is correct. I would not go as far as extending it to bedrooms in houses but certainly, Big Brother is watching where we wash, work, play, rent and everything else. Many was the day when we had no running water and we did it all out under the bushes, amuigh faoin spéir.

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