Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I may not use all my time. I thank the Green Party Members for putting down this motion. As somebody from the inner city, every time I hear Senator Garvey speak, either on water or biodiversity, I tend to learn much and see things from a perspective with which I would not have naturally come into contact. Personally, I think of anything outside the canals as being a rural area. This motion, together with Senator Garvey's motion on biodiversity, is comprehensive and informative. I pay tribute to the Green Party Senators for their Private Members' motions.

Like others, I hope agreement can be reached between Irish Water and local authority members before the July deadline. From a Labour Party perspective, it is critical that the terms and conditions of workers in local authorities are protected. We also support the idea of a referendum to ensure Irish Water stays in public ownership, if that was not clear from the past number of years.That has always been a long-term position of the Labour Party because we cannot leave something as important and fundamental as water to the vagaries of the market. With that in mind, we need to have a conversation about our investment in water infrastructure, which has reached a crisis point and, with climate change gaining speed, is likely to reach even more of a crisis point. Meaningful water quality has to mean investing in upgrades of pre-existing wastewater treatment plants. There is no point in talking about a revamped national development plan and national planning framework with bespoke solutions for increased housing in places such as Cork, Waterford and Galway if the infrastructure is not there to deliver the increased capacity that would be required to build those houses.

I now move to the important public health issue of wastewater discharge into our environment and the important investment that is needed in this regard. Last September, the Water Advisory Body basically admonished Irish Water and the Government for their slowness in addressing the legacy defects in Ireland's wastewater treatment infrastructure. The Water Advisory Body stated that the pace at which Irish Water was doing so "is too slow and there are repeated delays in providing treatment to many areas", that "19 large towns and cities ... [do] not meet European Union standards set to protect the environment" and that 33 towns and villages will continue to discharge raw sewage after 2021 because they will still not have a wastewater treatment plant.

One thing I have seen during the Covid pandemic has been the increased popularity of sea swimming, but with that comes a greater focus on the quality of the water in Dublin Bay, which is a biosphere. SOS Dublin Bay last month published a survey it had done of swimmers in the area. In March, 1,200 people were interviewed, and 21.8% of the participants declared they had been ill or had suffered adverse health effects as a result of swimming in the sea daily, which should be the safest, or at least a semi-safe, natural and normal thing to do. SOS Dublin Bay analysed data between 2017 and 2020 which it says show that 8.9 cu. m of untreated sewage and stormwater was discharged into Dublin Bay, mainly from the Ringsend treatment plant. To put that into context for people such as me who are not experts in this area, it means 3,550 full-sized Olympic swimming pools of untreated water over the four-year period, or 74 every month, dumped into Dublin Bay.

We need to get serious about investment in water infrastructure. I am certain that the Green Party in government will prioritise and progress this, but we all need to have a long-term commitment to this. For all the debate surrounding Irish Water in 2016 and 2017, from which I am still traumatised, one of the things I think everybody on a cross-party basis agreed was that Irish Water needs to stay in public ownership and we need to invest in our water system because it is at a critical crisis point. When any long-term weather event takes place, be it snow or too much sun, we tend to have water shortages. We need to work on a cross-party basis in the House to ensure we invest in that water infrastructure. It is not necessarily popular and it is not often called for but it is absolutely critical to future growth and the health of our population.