Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I wish to raise today something I feel passionate about and which has come up in many different Departments and realms. It started with us signing up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development goals in 2015. We must now get our heads around these because they are in the Standing Orders for every departmental committee thanks to my colleague, Deputy Ó Cathasaigh, who got them. Our committee meetings commenced this week and everybody will see they are on the Standing Orders.

I draw the attention of Senators to goal 6 in particular on clean water and sanitation. This is of deep concern to me and I am aware I have raised it before in the Seanad. It is a huge issue that is now prohibiting people from living in rural Ireland. As a spokesperson for rural development, there will be no development in rural Ireland unless we take this huge issue seriously. We have no money for raw sewage treatment in rural Ireland. We have issues in urban Ireland around lead leaking into the water but we are basically failing humans in Ireland by not supplying them with access to clean, safe drinking water. Raw sewage is the issue I wish to focus on today. In particular, shovel-ready projects in many villages in towns are ready to go but they will not be built until we can get funding for proper water sewage treatment in Ireland. As a result, people are getting poisoned from E. coli and cryptosporidium and many huge issues keep arising. They have been happening for years and yet we have done nothing about it.

I want the House to support me today in asking the Minister with responsibility for housing, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to come into the Chamber. I imagine everybody here lives in a place where we have issues around water and water treatment. If we do not ring-fence proper funding for water, we are going nowhere and now more than ever, we need to try to revive our towns and villages. They cannot survive, not to mention thrive, until we sort out water. It is our basic human right that we have signed up to in respect of the UN conference on the sustainable development goals. I ask all my colleagues here today to support me on this and also to bring it up in their committees under the Standing Orders on sustainable development goals. We only have until 2030 and we are failing. We are only one third of the way there since we signed up five years ago. Let us look at the sustainable development goals, get our heads around them and start prioritising them because we will all end up with better lives for ourselves and our children.