Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire Stáit as ucht teacht isteach. I am starting to sound like a broken record. I do not know how many times I have come in here with water issues but I will keep going.

The Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, only has 11 enforcement officers for the entire country. The most recent EPA report on water shows we still have huge issues with water quality all over Ireland. In my county, we had beaches closed due to E.coli and other issues in recent weeks and a massive fish kill in the Ballymacraven river going into the Inagh river, which goes from Inagh to Ennistymon and Lahinch. That was a 2.6 km complete wipeout, with everything killed along the route.

Things are going wrong and people are getting away with stuff, as they have been for years. Until we have more enforcement officers, the EPA results will not improve. A woman I know has a daughter who got E.coli poisoning and was in hospital again yesterday with kidney issues. They nearly lost her as a young child. This is a very severe issue. I would say we have a water quality emergency in our country, especially in light of the change in rainfall, which, as everybody including farmers will say, has exacerbated the issue.

We have two main issues: wastewater and agricultural run-off. Neither will be solved unless we take them seriously and have enforcement officers and investment in wastewater treatment. Some of our wastewater treatment is non-existent. It is going straight out into our rivers and seas. Some of it is poor at best. We are back in the Dark Ages about it. Water is one of the basic human rights and was one of the top priorities. You cannot have a house if you do not have water infrastructure. Many people get turned down for building housing estates or houses because we do not have the water infrastructure there. If we do not get water right, we do not get housing or health right. I was shocked to see how few enforcement officers are employed in the State. Until that changes, we are fighting a losing battle.

The biggest challenges to quality of water are nitrogen and phosphorus. Wastewater treatment and agriculture are the main sources of those pollutants. People always say it is the farmers but it is not. It is some of the farmers some of the time but we cannot blame all the farmers for this. Until we have proper enforcement, all the farmers will get blamed when it is a minority causing the issue. I defend farmers because many of them are my neighbours. They are not polluting the rivers. We have to call out the people doing this, rather than pitting one against the other and saying it is the farmers’ fault when it is not. Many small farmers do no damage.

There is a huge challenge because of the increased rainfall. We have less topsoil so it is harder for fertiliser to be soaked into the land and there is increased run-off. Rainfall levels have changed completely since the 1980s and 1990s due to climate change. We have storm water going in with the raw sewage for treatment and even the holding tanks are too small. A basic thing is to make holding tanks bigger. Water run-off with heavy rainfall is going into the tanks and we have had fountains of raw sewage. I have photos of it. It is not just in Clare, I am sure. We cannot solve any other issue if we cannot solve our water issue.

We have had serious investment by Irish Water but we have not done enough. That is blatantly obvious with beaches closing, people getting sick and fish kills. We have much more work to do and I would like to hear specifically what is being done around enforcement and increasing access to enforcement for local authorities to prevent this happening.