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

Water is a fundamental human right. It is vital for our families, our communities and public health but also for the well-being of society, our economy and, indeed, our environment. It has been our long-held view that the best way to deliver water and wastewater services is through a public service model where water and wastewater is provided on the basis of need and not ability to pay.

Of course, water is not free. People pay for it either through general taxation or through commercial water rates. It is important to note that because of the way in which we fund water services, we are unique in the OECD in having zero levels of water poverty in our society. Notwithstanding the challenges I will address, that is something we should be very proud of.

Uisce Éireann is dealing with some significant challenges and we need to be honest about what those are. Some of them are legacy issues such as the chronic underfunding of water services for decades, a history of fragmented management and delivery, controversy arising from a previous governments' attempts to introduce domestic water charges, the commercial nature of the utility and the previous threats of privatisation. Much of that colours the debate we have today and we need to be honest about it. My strong view is that the focus of our debate should be the future of water and wastewater services. For that we have to have a very honest assessment of where we are.

The Minister said there has been incredible progress in recent years. Unfortunately, some of the senior figures in Uisce Éireann do not agree with him. Only a matter of weeks ago, Jerry Grant, whom I am sure the Minister knows, and who is the chair of the board of Uisce Éireann and its former chief executive, and is one of the country's leading water service professionals with decades of experience in the public and private sectors, said that our water system was in a "desperate state". He said that this was because of extraordinary complacency and passive indifference around investment in infrastructure. He called for a new approach from Government. His comments need to be listened to and considered.

The debate here and our future engagement at the Oireachtas committee needs to focus on the most important question which is: how do we deliver world-class drinking water and wastewater services through a transparent and democratically accountable model of public service that meets the needs of society, the economy and the environment? In that context I welcome today's debate and I will set out views on a number of matters.

The first is, and it is important to acknowledge, that many of our colleagues, the Minister's backbenchers and mine, as well as councillors, often complain that the communication flow with Uisce Éireann needs to be improved. In addition to Uisce Éireann improving its own engagement, we need to look at the possibility of a change to legislation to create a statutory forum in every local authority for Uisce Éireann to come in and to be held accountable by local councillors on matters of local interest. That would greatly improve that information flow. My experience of Uisce Éireann, the chief executive and senior officials, as a lead spokesperson, is very positive but many of my colleagues at local and regional levels often do not find the same quality of information flow. That is something I want to name as a constructive criticism for the utility to address.

On the issue of capacity, again Jerry Grant made a very important distinction that the capital programme, which Uisce Éireann is currently finishing, was dealing with compliance and with getting our water system up to the standard it should have been at for long periods of time. It was not, however, about increasing capacity. That is the challenge we now have with its new plan and the new national planning framework, NPF. Uisce Éireann has made very clear that it needs something in the region of €2 billion of additional capital above and beyond what had been allocated previously to meet those challenges. It needs €1.7 billion to upgrade water and wastewater treatment in the 48 priority areas to try to meet that target, albeit too low in my view, outlined in the revised national planning framework, NPF, document of 300,000 new homes over the next period of time. It said it needs another €300 million to upgrade water wastewater treatment in those rural areas of populations below 1,000 people.

It is important for clarity and for honesty in the debate for the Government to set out very clearly when we are dealing with the NPF discussions on 30 April what its response is. How much of that ask from Uisce Éireann will the Government provide and over what period of time? There is no point in Government backbenchers coming in here over the next five years and complaining about the lack of funding for individual water and wastewater treatment plants if the Government has not provided money for them and has not ensured that they are in the capital programme. Everything cannot be funded, which I accept, but we need honesty in respect of all of these issues.

On planning, work still needs to be done in this area. First of all, this means, acknowledging that underlying critical infrastructure, and water is one of those, should be prioritised within our planning process. It is something we argued for during the passage of the Planning and Development Bill but utilities are not included in that Bill as a specified category. We need more staff for An Bord Pleanála. It is about 30 staff shy of the increased sanction that the Minister's predecessor provided. It will need an additional 50 staff beyond that. We also need more judges - at least three - in the planning and environmental panel of the High Court and to put the practice guidelines of the courts on a statutory basis so that there are timelines for judicial review, JR, decisions.

The greater Dublin drainage project has been in planning for seven years. I know the Minister is not responsible for this because he has just taken over but it was remitted back to the board three years ago, in the summer of 2021. Again, my point is not to criticise the board but it is a lack of resourcing and of statutory timelines which are the underlying problem and they need to be addressed.

I know the eastern and midlands water supply project is a very controversial one and it has a long history but Sinn Féin fully accepts the need for Dublin city and the wider greater Dublin area to diversify its water sources. That is an argument we accept. We are not opposed to this project in principle and we have taken the position all the way through. We have legitimate concerns which we have raised with Uisce Éireann and the Minister's predecessor and I will raise them here again today.

The first is continued and deeper engagement with elected representatives, communities, business and environmental interests as that project rolls out. It would not be acceptable for water to be pumped from one side of the country to the other and for a very large portion of that water to be lost in the distribution system because of leakage. We need to get the Dublin, in particular the Dublin city leakage rates, down to the internationally accepted norm of at least 20%. Dublin city is currently at 50% and, therefore, there needs to be greater work on that.

There is genuine concern among the public about the ability of the State to manage in a transparent and accountable manner such a large capital project. We need the maximum level of transparency and accountability to ensure this is done in the public interest. Our role will be to scrutinise and to hold the Government and Uisce Éireann to account on all of those matters.

There is a range of other issues, which I will not have the opportunity to go into in detail today, but I will flag some of them in the couple of minutes of speaking time I have left before I cede to my colleagues. With respect to the completion of the single utility, it is important that there continues to be some footprint within our local authorities, even if the staff are employed by Uisce Éireann. That connection with the local authorities for the public but also between the planning authorities and our public housing authorities is vital. Having those colocated has real merit and I would ask the Minister to pursue that matter.

The role of the utilities regulator, particularly in the blocking of what it believes is so-called speculative development, is causing a problem for residential supply.

I know Uisce Éireann has made suggestions about non-regulated funding. I have talked about the use, for example, of a housing infrastructure services company to get in and resolve those problems without in any way undermining the independence of the regulator. That has to be addressed because it is crucial.

Likewise, I do not think preplanning should just be for developments of over 100 units. For all of those other counties across the State where residential developers are doing developments of 20, 50 and 80 units, we need a much more structured and statutory-based preplanning process that does not just involve the local authority sections but also the utilities. Again, we have tabled amendments to the planning Bill on that but the Government would not accept them. Those issues need to be taken into account.

The taking in charge of group schemes is still too slow and the funding is inadequate. Ultimately, that is on the Government, not Uisce Éireann. So too is addressing the regular and important reports by the Environmental Protection Agency on water quality, and also the continued EU infringement actions for our failure to meet aspects of the urban wastewater treatment directive. There has been some progress but much more needs to be done.

Colleagues of the Minister mentioned connection delays, which are not always caused by the utilities but sometimes by builders or third parties. More work needs to happen on that.

With regard to the legacy issues of developer-owned infrastructure, my colleague from Donegal is dealing with this regularly. We still have some 600 residential developments built with pre-Celtic Tiger era planning permission wastewater treatment plants. There is no funding certainty for bringing those into active public ownership and we need to address that.

There is a final issue for the Minister that is not in the programme for Government. I urge him to consider the value of holding a referendum to enshrine public ownership of our water system in the Constitution. That would go an enormously long way to reassuring water services workers and the wider public that there is no intention of this Government or future Governments to privatise what is fundamentally a public service of the highest order and a fundamental human right, and one on which far greater work needs to be done by the Government with far greater levels of investment to meet the needs of communities as set out by the Minister in his opening remarks.

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