Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Our fresh water is in limited supply and is complex to manage but it is critically important for our health and well-being. Out of all of the water supply in the world, only a couple of per cent is fresh water. Most of it is salty seawater. Of the 2% or 3% of the water on the planet that is fresh water, most of that is tied up in polar ice caps. As a result, we have a very small percentage of fresh water that we need to manage. Everything that we flush out of our houses, down our sinks or into our drains ends up in rivers, lakes, in surface run-off and, ultimately, back in the sea, where the hydrological cycle continues and that comes back into our groundwater, lakes and rivers. That is really complex and difficult to manage. Some people would oversimplify it and say that we get lots of rain so we have plenty of water but we all know it is much more complex than that, in terms of managing it. I credit the local authorities and Irish Water for their management of our water. It has been very difficult to manage over the years because not enough resources were ever put into water. Putting pipes into the ground or adding extra capacity to a wastewater treatment plant were never vote getters. Things were allowed to fall into disrepair and not to function properly. Were it not for the skills and abilities of the local authority staff who managed the drinking water plants and wastewater treatment plants, we would be in a far worse situation. I want to pay credit to those people who struggled in the past to keep those plants going.

I studied water about 20 years ago when I was in the Dublin Institute of Technology. Much of what I was working on centred on water quality, water management and the impact of wastewater discharges on receiving waters. I have been reading these EPA reports for about 20 years now. The researchers names that always come up, McGarrigle, Lucy and so on, are very familiar to me because in 20 years of reading those reports, they have more or less been saying the same thing. They have been saying that we have excessive nitrates and phosphates in our waters. The sources of those excessive nitrates and phosphates are very well known and very well documented. They are from point sources, namely, wastewater treatment plants and from diffuse sources, namely, agricultural run-off. We need to be honest and say that there are the two main sources. There is some from forestry and some from erosion or turbidity issues, but we need to be honest with people about the two main sources and state it clearly. We have known for so long that the free-draining soils down in the south east coupled with excessive cattle numbers means that animal waste and fertilisers are running off into our water supply. That is what causes the excessive nitrates. Phosphates come from wastewater treatment plants. We can invest in wastewater treatment plants and are doing so. Quite a lot of money has been set aside to improve those plants. I was looking through some EPA reports recently on remedial works that are going on. It takes a little bit of time but we will get there.

Lots of people do not want to state the obvious which is that in certain areas we have too many cattle creating too much animal waste, we have too much fertiliser and too much run-off into our waters. That is a problem. I often wonder why this is not something that people raise with me on doorsteps. They do not raise it. When I knock on doors while canvassing, not many people ask me what I am going to do about water quality. A lot of people look at the water that comes out of their taps and in the main in Ireland it is good quality drinking water. I know there are boil notices in many parts of the country and many people do not have good quality drinking water but in the main, that is what we see. If one looks at a river or a lake, unless it is really overgrown, nutrified and malodorous, one will think that the water is just water and that is it. I do not know how we make the leap to show people the really significant impact on human health that this can have. When one looks at the remedial action lists for our drinking water, one must remember that our drinking water comes out of those same rivers, lakes and groundwater supplies into which the discharges from wastewater treatment plants and the excessive run-off from agricultural sources flows. All of that ends up in the rivers and when we extract and treat that water, which is a complex process, much depends on what we are feeding into those drinking water supplies. Where we have excessive organic loading from land that has been excessively drained, land that is eroding or from forestry and we treat that with chlorine in a drinking water plant, we create trihalomethanes, THMs, which are potentially carcinogenic. That is what we have to bear in mind when we talk about improving water quality. We could be creating carcinogenic products in drinking water. On the remedial action list, we can see the plants that suffer from excessive THM levels.

We are also talking about nitrogen going into the water. Excessive nitrates in the water can have a really serious impact, especially on young children and infants who are fed formula made with that water. Methemoglobinemia, known as blue baby syndrome, is a condition whereby oxygen is dragged out of the blood because of excessive nitrates in the water. That is a significant health issue. We see around the country every now and again that nitrate levels are exceeded and boil notices are issued. That is another health aspect of this. E. coli are another concern. Coliforms are natural, they happen; they are in everybody's gut, in the soil, they are everywhere. There are two particularly bad ones, 157 and 026, both of which are a very strong indicator, if not proof, that there is contamination in the water from the human gut, animal gut, animal waste or human faeces. That shows that there are inputs in the water system which can make people incredibly sick. I am sure everybody here has had food poisoning but E. coli poisoning can make one incredibly sick, and if one is vulnerable and in poor health, it can do a huge amount of damage. They are known as VTEC coliforms and they can have a really significant impact on the kidney function of young children.

We need to change the narrative here. We have lots of water in this country, we have lakes and rivers which look nice and there is greenery around them but we need to get down, have a look and say that we need to look after this water. As already stated, it is a finite resource that is delicate and fragile and which can be damaged very quickly. If we damage groundwater aquifers, they can take decades to recover. A fast flowing river may be able to deal with discharge into it through dilution and flow but if we start damaging ground water we are in trouble. Cryptosporidium is another concern. It arises where there is excessive grazing by sheep on a low soil base with karst limestone underneath. Cryptosporidium outbreaks are another health issue that we need to consider.

When I think about water quality reports, having been reading them for over 20 years, that is what I think about. I think about the impact it has on our health and what we need to do to address it. We need to reduce the organic loading into our water. In forestry, for example, we need to have greater setbacks and to ensure that the buffer zones are there when we are clear felling. In fact, we should do away with clear felling and move towards continuous cover to protect soils, bind them and stop that excessive discharge of sediments.

Investment in wastewater treatment plants is very important. We have an old system in this country involving combined sewer overflows, CSOs. This means that when we get huge downpours of rain, the surface water combines with the foul water and it can overload our wastewater treatment plants. The plants overtop and cannot handle the water. Engineering interventions need to be made to separate the foul water from the surface water and those works are ongoing.

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For decades, not enough has been invested in this and, as a result, there are those combined sewer overflows. There will be more high rainfall events in future. Wastewater treatment plants will be overloaded and there will be those discharges to receiving waters of water that has not been treated properly or for long enough. We need to address that.

The Citizens' Assembly on Biodiversity Loss prepared an exceptionally good report and presented it to Oireachtas Members today. It includes a full section on freshwater. That citizens' assembly is made up of 99 ordinary members of society selected at random to give a good cross-section of Irish society, from across the rural and urban divide and all sectors. We can work to implement that request. As politicians, we can have confidence it is on what people want us to work. They want us to work on protecting nature and water. Politicians are often afraid to stand up and criticise a particular sector or state that more needs to be done in the sector. This work needs to be done, however, and the citizens' assembly shows us that if we, as politicians, are brave enough to stand up and take those difficult decisions, the people will be behind us. In fact, they are ahead of us on this. We in this House are often very slow to react and only do so when we realise the people are behind us. This, however, is what they are asking for. A copy of the report of the citizens' assembly report was issued to each Oireachtas Member. It is an easy read and I urge people to read it. The EPA report is also an easy read. It is too easy to read such reports, put them back on the shelf and not take action. We need urgent action. We needed it 20 years ago but, to protect people's health, we need action and investment and measures to be put in place right now to stop us destroying a finite and valuable resource that is critical to human health.

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