Water Services Dail Éireann — 2026-05-13 ============================================================ Mattie McGrath (IND), Tipperary South The same thing is happening. I think it was Albert Einstein who said that doing same thing over and over again and expecting a different result was a form of insanity. Uisce Éireann is obviously out of control. We all know that from dealing with it on a regular basis. The Minister of State believes this. Its arrogance is typified by the statement that 81% of farmers have signed up to a project that does not have planning permission or an abstraction licence. Imagine that. Hundreds of millions of euro paid out, along with a 25% payment, to those landowners. I criticised the IFA and ICMSA for doing those kinds of seedy deal before the planning permission for the project had even been granted. This is what goes on in this country. What about the hundreds of landowners who have not signed up and do not want this going through their lands? Many others might not want it either but they are being forced to by so-called representative bodies. We are leaving the people behind. Have we learned nothing from the protests in recent weeks? I could go into a lot of stuff here. The habitats directive has been totally overridden. The Shannon system is already ecologically stressed. There are alternatives that have not been examined. It is insane to pump treated water from Parteen Basin into Dublin just to leak up to 40% of it into the ground. We ought to remember what leaks back in when the pressure goes down or there are bursts - the filth and dirt that seeps back in to the people of Dublin in the water they are getting. We are told that we are going to store the water in the pipe for a month during different drought periods. What kind of water are we going to have? This is insane but it is just a typical example of Uisce Éireann's arrogance. It will not deal with anybody properly. It just throws money at the problem and the Government throws money at Uisce Éireann. Councillors Séamie Morrison and Phyll Bugler, Ms Emma Kennedy, the team here last week and all the others who are opposed to this - not for any selfish reasons, but for the sake of the ecology, the River Shannon, the region and sanity - are not going to go away easily because it is riddled with mistakes. There will be judicial reviews and God knows what else, and it will fall down all over the place because it is based on a tissue of false information instead of proper statistics. --- 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/2026-05-13/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:03+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-13