Malcolm Noonan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator for bringing this matter forward as a Commencement matter. I addressed it previously, and the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, also has addressed it previously. It is an unfortunate incident and unacceptable, that must be said. In regard to an update, the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, met the managing director of Irish Water, as well as the chief executives of both Dublin City Council and Wexford County Council on 8 September 2021 to discuss the incidents at Ballymore Eustace and Gorey water treatment plants and held a follow-up meeting on 13 October 2021. In those meetings the Minister requested Irish Water to undertake immediately a number of improvements, including audits of the water treatment plants throughout the country. In November 2021, Irish Water provided an update to the Minister. While initially prioritising the largest 20 treatment plants, the list was expanded to the top 25 water treatment plants to cover the largest for both population served and output volume. With the addition of the Gorey plant this resulted in the top 26 water treatment plants being assessed. These plants serve approximately 65% of Irish Water's customer base.

During late September and early October last year, Irish Water completed the following: audits of the top 26 plants, which entailed evaluating the existing alarms and incident responses within the plants along with the applicability of shutdown procedures; site staff training at these plants; and the initiation of corrective actions based on the findings of the audits. In addition to these actions Irish Water has subsequently provided technical specialist support on site to these top 26 sites and has rolled out incident management refresher training across all local authorities. In January 2022 Irish Water established its national operations management centre. This centre receives data from the top 26 water treatment plants via a national telemetry system, thereby allowing Irish Water to monitor critical alarm signals on a 24-7 basis. The coverage of this central monitoring by Irish Water will be expanded to other water treatment plants on a phased basis. In addition, Irish Water has undertaken to issue critical standard operating procedures to the top 26 plants during January 2022 and to complete works on these sites to deliver water quality assurance works.

To conclude, Irish Water, local authorities and their staff have responded to the serious incidents at Gorey and Ballymore Eustace by putting in place a range of measures to provide greater assurance around the management of our water treatment plants including 24-7 monitoring of plants that serve the majority of the population. It will be important to continue to monitor the effectiveness of these measures as Irish Water continues along its evolution to become a fully integrated company with full control over its own staffing resources. It is important, as the Senator said, that we learn lessons from these incidents. There were serious public health breaches that we must ensure will never happen again. In regard to the point the Senator made in regard to Wexford County Council's report, I agree that should be published for transparency purposes. All the outputs of the investigations into what happened should be publicly available for elected Members, the wider public, Irish Water and the local authorities to learn from the lessons of the mistakes on these two unfortunate incidents.