Water: Statements Dail Éireann — 2026-01-21 ============================================================ Barry Ward (FG), Dún Laoghaire If I were from Kerry and, between the Minister of State, Deputy Healy-Rae, and Deputy Cahill, I had not had my village or townland mentioned, I wonder how I would feel. I understand and agree with many of the issues they have raised. The issue I want to raise is along the same lines, as it relates primarily to wastewater treatment. In Dublin we have a Victorian wastewater system. It is not fit for purpose any more. The extent of development of building in Dublin, while welcome from the point of view of providing housing that is much needed, means there is absolutely unbearable pressure on that system now. One of the great and easily solved problems is that when it rains heavily, all the run-off from the roads that flows into the gullies at the sides of roads goes into the sewerage system, into the same pipes where toilets are emptied and domestic sewage is emptied. In the case of my own area, it goes down to the West Pier pumping station at Dún Laoghaire and is pumped in an under-seabed pipe to Poolbeg for treatment, before the treatment water is discharged into the sea. That is all very well but because the system is over capacity, the volume of water that is now arriving at the West Pier pumping station is vastly in excess of the capacity of the pipe to pump it into Poolbeg, and vastly in excess of the capacity of Poolbeg to treat the water. What happens on a day like today when it has been lashing rain all day and we have had a lot of water accumulating on the roads and going into those gullies and into the sewerage system? An excess of water arrives at the West Pier pumping station. In fairness, before Irish Water was there, what is called an attenuation tank was built. It is an overflow tank of 70,000 cu. m that is there to take that water and hold it until after the rain stops and there is capacity within the pipe once again to pump it to Poolbeg. However, when there is a lot of heavy rain, as there is today, that tank gets full. If you simply hold that water, the tank gets full, the pumping station is beyond capacity and the water backs up. It then comes up through toilets and drains all the way through the areas of south Dublin that are closest to the sea at the bottom of the hills. That is not acceptable. What is done instead is it is dumped into the sea. All of this water that has accumulated at the West Pier pumping station gets put directly into Dublin Bay contributing to E. coli, poor water quality and places where it is unsafe to swim, or even for animals to run around. It is totally unacceptable. Nobody can tell me in this House how many times that happens per year. We know it will happen several times this week, but nobody could tell me in 2024 or 2025 how many times it happens. The people who live in the area will not know about it until a few days afterwards when the council has tested the water and puts up a no bathing notice. That is not on either. What can we do about it when nobody has any plan to solve it? There is a raft of possible measures, however. The simplest and perhaps the quickest one is to build a second attenuation tank at the West Pier. That would be another 70,000 cu. m that could accommodate the overflow from the overflow, but we have to deal with the underlying problem as well, solve it in quick order and not wait for it to get worse. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. 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