Water Policy: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2022-11-09
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Brian Leddin (GP), Limerick City

As legislators we have the opportunity to ensure our policies and laws are fit for purpose. If this debate is anything to go by, we have a lot of work to do to protect our water. The most recent EPA report on water quality was published last month and it is not good news. Only about half of our rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal waters are in a satisfactory condition and the overall ecological health of our waters has declined in recent years. The analysis finds the main pressures on water quality agriculture, physical changes such as land drainage and dredging, forestry activities and discharges from urban wastewater. The only good news is that although the number of water bodies impacted by urban wastewater remains high, it is reducing and the trend is going in the right direction.
The number of water bodies impacted by agriculture has, however, increased in recent years and the train is going firmly in the wrong direction. While we have regulations to control water pollution from agriculture, they need to be implemented. I have concerns that these are not being enforced. I fear our water quality will continue to decline in the areas where we have intensive farming with high levels of nitrogen input.
Many of the physical alterations to our watercourses are perpetuated by legislation that dates back to the 1940s. The Arterial Drainage Act 1945 requires the Office of Public Works to maintain water catchments covering about 20% of our country. This amounts to drainage, dredging, bank clearance and the clearing of silt and vegetation in more than 11,000 sq km of rivers and streams with no regard for anything natural living nearby. The effect is to get water to flow more quickly out of the countryside. Ultimately, we are draining our land and rendering it incapable of holding water in times of flood and guaranteeing that the land continues to act as a carbon source rather than a much-needed carbon store. The Arterial Drainage Act should be reviewed. It has been discussed by the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action, which I chair, a number of times and we will publish an important report next week that will address this and other issues.
I must mention the project due to bring 350 million litres of water a day from the River Shannon catchment to Dublin. The project highlights the many failures in how water is managed in this country and we need to drop it and start to think about clever solutions for where the urban growth for Dublin should go. We can and should look at concentrating growth in our urban centres and places such as Limerick, Galway, Cork and Waterford where pressures are not as acute.

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Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:15+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-11-09