‘Really concerning’ that Irish Water has no plan for 27 of 38 areas needing priority upgrading

Completion of a major upgrade of the Ringsend sewage treatment plant in Dublin will result in 90 per cent of sewage in Ireland being treated to EU environmental standards, Minister for Environment Eamon Ryan has said.

His comments follow the publication of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report which found that only half of Ireland’s sewage was treated to EU environmental standards, well below the European average of 90 per cent.

The Ringsend €500 million upgrade is set to be completed in 2025.

Mr Ryan said the Government had allocated €1.6 billion for next year to address key challenges around raw sewage, and the priority was to deal with two large urban areas after the European Court of Justice found that Ireland failed to comply with standards in eight such areas.

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He said there had been a measure of progress in this. “Two areas had been resolved, four will be resolved by 2025, and the final two are scheduled for completion by the end of the decade.”

But he said “that is just one aspect of areas where we are in contravention”, and they had to first address the areas held to account by the European courts.

The Minister was responding after Social Democrats co-leader Catherine Murphy raised concerns about the EPA report which identified 38 areas where work needs to be prioritised to prevent wastewater from harming rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal waters.

She said it was “really concerning” that Irish water had no clear plan for 27 of these. The Kildare North TD said that raw sewage in Dublin Bay was “destroying one of the city’s most treasured natural amenities”.

She said SOS Dublin Bay found in a survey that more than one in five people last year who came into contact with water in Dublin Bay through swimming or water sports became ill. The situation was so bad it was potentially “equivalent to 74 Olympic swimming pools of untreated wastewater being discharged into Dublin Bay every month. And we’re told that the problem will not be rectified until 2025.”

She said it was also concerning that the report noted areas where work had been completed but failed to meet standards. “Clonakilty, Kinsale and Ballymote have the necessary treatment infrastructure” and met the targets in 2020 but failed to meet them the following year.

Mr Ryan said it was critically important to ensure that public water and other systems were “in pristine condition”, and he acknowledged “that’s not the case at the present time”.

He said that in situations where “the even upgraded system can’t cope, then we’re going to have to come back because we do have to set a standard”.

He added that €6 billion was committed to water in the capital programme from 2021 to 2025. Continuous systematic investment in water quality was necessary, and “that was not always popular in previous governments or this House in previous years”.

Ms Murphy also expressed concern that Irish Water appeared not to have provided timelines to the EPA for this work “because it regularly gets criticism for failing to meet those targets”.

“In other words, Irish water does not have competence in its ability to deliver projects on time. So it simply stops publishing deadlines so it can’t be held accountable for failure.”

She said the authority should be under the remit of the Public Accounts Committee to give oversight on spending and value for money because otherwise “we’re not able to really get under the bonnet” of that issue.

The Minister told her that any proposals to deal with governance could be dealt with in legislation to be introduced to separate Irish Water from parent company Ervia.