Water: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-21
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Conor Sheehan (LAB), Limerick City

I thank the Minister for his speech. To try to be somewhat constructive, we had good news from the Government this week with the €250 million announcement in my constituency into water treatment in Bunlicky near Mungret, County Limerick. That is important because once the work is done the capacity of that plant will be able to serve 285,000 people. This is more than double what it can do at the moment. This is vital because the population of Limerick is going to go up by 50% under the targets that are there.
As a country, we are in a sense fundamentally not serious about the way we treat water and the way we treat Uisce Éireann as a utility that provides critical infrastructure. The issues Deputies have had around the country have been well aired at this stage. The fact of the matter is that Uisce Éireann should have a multi-annual funding settlement. Every year, it has to enter the budgetary process in the same way as social protection, education, justice and so on and, essentially, bid for its fair share. This creates an uncertainty and hinders its ability to plan and deliver the long-term infrastructure projects that we need. Some of these projects can take five or ten years.
As we emerge from what is essentially a lost decade when it comes to infrastructure, one of the results of that is poor water services and high leakage rates. We need to learn the lessons that come with that. One of the lessons is to provide utilities like Uisce Éireann with a multi-annual funding settlement. The funding uncertainty that comes from the failure to provide it and other utilities with the certainty that comes with multi-annual funding is a huge threat to our ability to deliver housing at scale.
It is fashionable and it might sound good to come in here and have a right go at Irish Water. It is far from perfect. I have had huge issues with it. It is doing its best to operate within the constraints that this Government and previous Governments have placed on it. It is supposed to be a single national utility. It needs to be properly considered as such as opposed to the old system of the local authorities and the local authorities coming together. It needs €100 billion of funding up to 2050. That is the true scale of underinvestment that we have had in water services in this country. In fairness to the Government, it has allocated €12 billion over the next four years. It is only after a very successful public lobbying and I would argue shaming campaign in respect of Uisce Éireann.
We need to recalibrate how we consider, think about and deliver water infrastructure. We need to stop thinking of Uisce Éireann just as this utility to help us to fulfil our environmental compliance obligations. We need to start to consider it, fund it and think about it as a vital utility to allow us to reach our housing targets. What I mean by this is to commit it the funding to deliver on the housing targets beyond 2029 on an ongoing multi-annual basis.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-31T01:00:51+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-21