It sometimes takes a potential public relations disaster to bring home to people the need for clean water.
This is true of the European Open golf championship which, it now transpires, may be televised from the banks of a polluted river. A sewage treatment plant near Naas, Co Kildare, is again undergoing repairs and work is expected to last for three weeks. The tournament takes place from July 4th to 9th at the K Club which will play host to the Ryder Cup in September.
The River Liffey has already been contaminated from the Osberstown plant to Islandbridge, a distance of 20 miles, arising from partially-treated sewage discharges. And, while no fish kills have been reported, angling has been affected. Many top golfers are keen fishermen. And it had been hoped to promote this aspect of Irish tourism during the European Open. That may not now happen and a valuable opportunity could be lost.
In recent years, the Government has invested heavily in sewage and water treatment works under the National Development Plan. And significant progress has been made. In spite of that, an EU directive that requires the secondary treatment of waste from urban centres has not been fully implemented. In the case of the rapidly growing Naas region, an upgraded sewage plant is not expected to be operational until the middle of next year.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified inadequate sewage treatment plants as major contributors to water pollution. Only the farming community has a worse record. Extensive fish kills caused by badly-managed silage and slurry effluents are now largely a thing of the past. But, because of the falls in river levels during the recent fine weather, farmers will have to be particularly vigilant. We still enjoy a high standard of water quality in this country, compared to our European neighbours. There, intensive agricultural practices and industrial development have turned many waterways into green, oxygen-depleted soups where only the hardiest of fish survive. Here, a concerned public should be alert in guarding our special and vulnerable heritage.
Local authorities have a poor record in protecting the environment, both in terms of water quality and rubbish disposal. But those failures arose largely from inadequate funding. Now that the EPA has been given the role of policeman and the Government has begun to open the purse-strings, that situation is changing. However low-level pollution continues at municipal and farming levels, with intermittent, serious flare-ups. The threat to our image as a green, clean island is never far away, as is evident from the current pollution of the Liffey.