Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I add my voice to the welcome for this motion brought forward by the Green Party. It opens by stating that Seanad Éireann "recognises that clean water is a basic human right of every inhabitant of this country". I completely agree, but it is incumbent on states to give effect to such rights. In 2010, there was a resolution before the UN General Assembly and, unfortunately, the Irish Government, of which the Green Party and Fianna Fáil were both members at the time, abstained on it. Thankfully, it passed without the support of the Irish State, but in 2014 the very successful European Citizens' Initiative gathered 1.8 million signatures from citizens across the EU member states calling for that right to be recognised in EU law.The European Commission then ignored the Right2Water European Citizens' Initiative. In 2015, I was the rapporteur for the report passed by the European Parliament that echoed the calls from citizens across EU member states for the human right to water and sanitation to be recognised in EU law.

It is now 2021 and the EU and Ireland have yet to give effect to the UN resolution on the human right to water and sanitation. We have a proud history with regard to the right to water in this country. People were not going to take regressive water charges lying down. They mobilised through trade unions, civil society organisations and community groups and built a real movement in the form of Right2Water Ireland. Those mobilisations we saw were the largest in the history of the State and they caught the attention of water rights movements across the globe, including in Bolivia, the US, Canada, Italy, Spain and Germany.

International organisations such as Food & Water Watch as well as the Blue Planet Project co-founder and author of multiple books on the human right to water, Maude Barlow, rightly praised zero water poverty in Ireland as being a direct result of not having domestic water charges. I have spoken in many countries and engaged with multiple academics about household metering not reducing water use and in some cases actually having the opposite effect of increasing usage. Not only that, but individual household meters add to the cost of water provision, whereas district metering facilitates leak identification without significantly increasing the cost of water provision.

I will use the rest of my time to highlight some other areas of concern regarding water, specifically data centres. Owned by large multinationals, such as Facebook and Amazon, these centres use vast amounts of water. As Killian Woods reported last summer in the Business Post, these facilities require "millions of litres of water every day to cool down their servers". That revelation came after a hosepipe ban had been introduced to cut back on household water usage due to drought conditions.

I highlighted some of the issues with data centres previously, especially regarding their impact on our greenhouse gas, GHG, emissions and increasing demand on the grid. It all boils down to the fact that the planning authorities, which are local authorities and An Bord Pleanála, are not required to take account of the cumulative impact these data centres are having on our infrastructure and on reaching our climate targets. Instead, they can only consider each data centre individually on its own merits, including with regard to water usage. The usage of a data centre may not seem huge but the cumulative effect is considerable.

Climate change also means that Ireland is becoming more susceptible to water scarcity. This is especially the case in the eastern part of the country, the region that has seen the mushrooming of data centres in recent years. Environmental impact assessments, EIAs, fail to consider this, as An Taisce has correctly highlighted. The UN resolution on the right to water obliges states to take deliberate action to prevent third parties such as corporations from interfering in any way with the enjoyment of the right to water. However, we have a Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, headed by the Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, which is enthusiastically encouraging more of these data centres to be established here without putting adequate protections in place.

I also raise the issue of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, CETA, and the threat it poses to the right to water. The UN special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation has remarked that states, in entering into agreements regarding trade and investment, must ensure that such agreements do not limit or hinder a country's capacity to ensure the full realisation of human rights to water and sanitation. We must be alive to the threat that CETA poses to our water and sanitation.

We oppose investment treaties that prioritise corporate rights over human rights. The arbitration chapters of trade agreements like CETA allow private companies to sue governments for legislation which affects their legitimate expectations of profit. There have already been significant investment disputes regarding water under the Energy Charter Treaty, ECT, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, with both cases resulting in settlements in favour of investors and against the states in question. Article 1.9 of CETA clearly states: "If a Party permits the commercial use of a specific water source, it shall do so in a manner consistent with this Agreement." Commercial use is, therefore, subject to CETA trade and investment rules. Under CETA's negative list, all public services are threatened because they are all covered in the agreement unless explicitly ruled out by the Government. The Government has made no effort to protect the ownership or regulation of education, health, water, transport, waste disposal, oil, gas, energy and-or grids, among other important sectors.As I thought I had more time, I also want to move on to the issue of fracking, which wreaks havoc on water supplies. We need to have a ban on the importation of fracked gas. We have heard commitments from the Government that it will do so. Will it be like co-living? Is the Government just going to flag it up so the companies can get their applications in before the ban comes into place? We know that the Shannon liquefied natural gas, LNG, terminal is still on the projects of common interest, PCI, list until September 2021. Therefore, we need that ban on the importation of fracked gases. We have rightly banned fracked gas here because of its impact on water. We cannot now allow other communities to suffer their water sources being polluted.