Erin McGreehan (Louth, Fianna Fail)

Along with my constituency colleague, I want to pay respects to those poor five souls, the young people who lost their lives in the car accident at the weekend: Chloe McGee, Shay Duffy, Alan McCluskey, Dylan Commins and Chloe Hipson. It is a desperate loss for their families, friends, work colleagues and everybody. I only hope their families can find the strength to walk along the pain and agony that comes upon a family when they lose someone so tragically. It seems almost futile and frivolous to mention it during a discussion on water quality.

I have raised on several occasions the state of the water and rivers around Dundalk Bay. Research was published recently in a local newsletter spelling out clearly issues around repeated sewage discharge and wastewater plants operating beyond capacity, with visible waste near Blackrock and protected habitats being steadily damaged. People are seeing it, smelling it and living beside it. As the Taoiseach knows, I raise these concerns regularly and I get very dismissive responses from Irish Water. I often feel almost gaslit by them. I hope that when the Cabinet committee is working on water quality with the infrastructure Department that it will consider fast-tracking projects to make sure our water quality is up to standard.

See this speech in context