Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I support my colleagues Senators Conway and Dooley. We were in Shannon Airport yesterday and it was like a ghost town. I strongly support their convictions around proper regional development, which they keep talking about. However, it is time for action, not words, on Shannon Airport and that whole region.

I want to talk about something much more basic than flying, which is the basic human right to clean water. According to the United Nations, all humans have the right to water and sanitation. The human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case here. Since last January, I have gotten phone calls every day of the week from local group schemes or Irish Water run schemes about this matter. We are failing as a nation to provide the basic human right of water.

It is now the new norm to buy bottled water in our country. I remember being in Germany as a young teenager 30 years ago and saying they were mad for buying water and that it would never do in Ireland. Now everyone is buying water all the time. It is a completely normal thing to buy plastic bottles of water. People who are on low incomes, people in direct provision and single mothers are struggling to buy water because they cannot afford it and they are then left with poor quality water for baby food or washing their clothes. Some towns in Clare have had at least 32 incidents of more than three days with no water of any kind, and the group schemes and Irish Water are not supplying any alternatives. Under the UN resolution, water has to be accessible. We used to run fundraisers for wells in South Africa and Ethiopia and now I feel like I need to do fundraisers for people in my own county.

This is not unique to Clare because there are also huge issues in cities, where people are afraid to swim. We cannot drink our water, we cannot cook with it and we cannot swim in it. We need to peel this back to the basics and at least try to get our water right. I look forward to everyone in this House and the other House supporting me in the work we are going to have to do to rectify this situation because we are ending up with 1 million empty plastic water bottles in our seas every day as well. This is an environmental issue, a social issue and a huge health issue if people are drinking poor quality water. We have had incidents of E. coli and cryptosporidium around tourist areas as well. We want people who live in Ireland and who come to Ireland to have confidence in our water and we need to re-instil that confidence. I look forward to working with the whole House on that huge human rights issue.