The explanatory memorandum to the Bill admits that the legislation on the provision of drinking water and treatment of waste water extends back to Victorian times. From that one must infer that the infrastructure that still exists in many part of the country to supply water and collect waste water remains essentially Victorian in the condition of the pipes, their diameter, and the loadings that have been put on them by poor planning, especially in larger urban areas. It is the Government's responsibility to state how, not only in legislative terms, this can be met by a framework of agencies.
Resources must be provided to update the infrastructure in both the provision of drinking water and the collection of waste water. There has been investment, and some of it has come through European funding, something of which the Minister will have been aware in his previous incarnation. However, that option is no longer open to us for infrastructural development. The remaining large works that must be carried out will have to be funded almost entirely by the Exchequer unless the Government, as it seems to be implying in general terms through this legislation, can magic the provision of resources through its reliance on public private partnerships.
If the Government intends to take that route in meeting this shortfall, I fear that future legislation will be needed to pick up the pieces. We can see that from the examples of other countries that have engaged private enterprise to provide water and collect waste water, which must be the most public of services and resources. That experiment has gone badly wrong. We need look no further than our nearest neighbour, the United Kingdom, and the utter catastrophe of dividing its water system into several regional privatised companies. That has done nothing for the quality of the water or its provision to the end user. In environmental terms, it has certainly brought about a greater reliance on state intervention.
Regarding the poor infrastructure that remains in larger urban areas, other speakers referred to the leakage difficulties which have been measured in towns such as Dublin and Cork as between 25% and 40% of the water supply. Some of it has to do with the corrosive joints and the pipes themselves. However, there is still the problem in too many parts of the network in many metropolitan areas that pipes are made of lead. Progress in replacing lead pipes in metropolitan areas has been much too slow. By not doing so, we are also aiding the contamination of the water supply which we must then ameliorate through other sources, often through the excessive use of chlorine in drinking water supplies.
I know that my colleague has spoken at length about the other additions made in treatment centres before water reaches households, such as the near exclusive and only State use of fluoride in our drinking water supply. The new Minister should address that as a priority. However, he has yet to say whether he believes it a problem and whether the Government is committed — it has not been to date — to overcoming the inconsistency and contradiction that it claims to represent public health while adding to our water supply something that, in the quantities in which it is now introduced, can damage public health.
The Green Party will be consistent in challenging the Government to ensure that the issue is brought to the forefront and that an amendment to the Health Act, in which it was introduced, is made. It might even be possible, through a comprehensive Water Services Bill, to submit such an amendment here. We intend giving active consideration to that on Committee Stage and hope that the Minister might be able to respond to it.
Another difficulty regarding the piping infrastructure and its use in other areas is fire safety. As a member of a local authority in Cork, I have seen several instances where, as a result of such poor infrastructure, we have learnt too late the water pressure necessary at key and critical times. The most obvious example was the major chemical accident at what was then the Hickson pharmaceutical plant in Ringaskiddy in 1993 where efforts to extinguish the fire ceased because the water supply was inadequate. The diameter of the pipes was not wide enough while the strength of the water flow was insufficient. Luckily, that situation was resolved and the necessary expenditure was later made to ensure such an event could not take place again at that location. I later learned of other industrial sites where the supply of water was weak and needed to be strengthened; no doubt there are others. The Government, acting in concert with local authorities, lacks a plan to make water readily available to ensure fire safety, particularly with regard to industrial sites covered by the Seveso directive. I speak as a Deputy for a constituency which has the heaviest concentration of Seveso installations in the country. The Bill does not deal with this matter in any proper length and detail.
I share the concern of other speakers that the role of local authorities and their members is being further undermined by the proposals in the Bill. The Minister, having up to recently been a member of a local authority, might comment on this matter when considering the Bill on Committee and Report Stages. It is ironic that one of the few executive powers of elected members of a local authority is the power to put in place a water quality management plan that applies to estuaries and bays in the functional area of a local authority trying to control effluents entering from industrial, agricultural or domestic sources. Sadly, this power has been exercised very slowly and in limited circumstances. Other than Dublin City Council, I know of no local authority which has put a water quality management plan in place on the say-so of the elected members. No doubt some of my colleagues may tell of how such efforts have been frustrated at departmental and official level. However, Dublin City Council has not followed through on the spirit of its plan.
The fact that there is such a power and that it is not widely used contrasts greatly with the imposition of the water services authority and the need, as a result of this legislation, to bring forward a water services strategic plan. Making this a function of the unelected members of local authorities who the Minister knows will be the managers undermines local government further. Sadly, this is of a piece with all the legislation introduced by all the Minister's predecessors in recent years. All the legislation related to local government decision-making has undermined the role of local council members, particularly in the case of waste management plans. If we believe services are best delivered at local level by those elected to represent their local communities because they know how services are impacting on their lives, we should not introduce legislation of this type. I hope the Minister is sympathetic to these views. We will wait to see if he is prepared to put in place measures to indicate that he is.
The wastewater issue has been touched on by many speakers. Many of the problems which affect the infrastructure of drinking water also apply to wastewater. I have seen the avoidance of responsibility by local authorities for the collapse of individual wastewater networks and even wider networks. Some of the problems have arisen because the original piping was designed to cope with populations now far exceeded. It is unfair that when the piping and the infrastructure break down, householders are expected to repair them. We need a legislative framework which accepts that the State or the local authority responsible for providing the infrastructure should ensure it does work, that the load is not exceeded, and that if it is, the responsibility lies with the local authority concerned.
We are now moving towards implementation of the European directive on wastewater treatment. This Bill lacks the sense of urgency needed in this area. While Dublin has its single major plant which is probably not sufficient for its needs and is causing obvious problems, many areas of the country are nowhere close to meeting the EU directive deadline. In practice, the Government expects the infrastructure to be provided through some kind of public private partnership. That is unfortunate and will create problems.
The wastewater treatment facility in Cork will come on stream soon and there is a contract for an outside body to run it. We will see how the experience pans out. Even with this multi-million euro investment which resulted in the city being torn up for the past few years, at the end of the process we only have, for a population of 150,000 to 175,000, a secondary treatment wastewater plant. Far too often these inconsistencies on the part of local authorities are tolerated by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. When exercising the highest possible environmental standards, we should not only live up to the standards laid down for us in the EU directives but should bear in mind that these standards are likely to change in the future. We should have in place standards which will apply in 20, 30 or 50 years' time in order that infrastructural investment in the future will not be necessary.
The other difficulty regarding wastewater treatment relates to the sludge and waste created. Once again the Government has not asked the necessary questions about what will happen to this waste. The Cork plant which will probably be the model used by other local authorities will treat domestic and industrial wastewater together. Therefore, there will be a degree of toxicity in the waste produced. This will need a special dumping location while the nature of the waste will preclude it from the usage suggested by those promoting such plants in the past. Among those suggestions were laying the waste in sludge or pellet form on park land or golf courses. That is totally off the agenda. We will have hundreds and thousands of tonnes of sludge and pellets which must be disposed of.
The Green Party has suggested alternative wastewater treatments on a smaller localised level. Those treatments might apply more readily to rural than urban communities, but there has been a very slow take-up by the Department and the local authorities of innovative treatments such as reedbed treatment on a small scale. They would deal with the treatment of wastewater and the production of any waste resulting from it.
Rural water schemes have generated much comment. I reiterate what other speakers have said — we should be grateful for the provision of infrastructure in rural communities through voluntary effort. This is the opposite of the method being used by the Government to provide infrastructure for the future. Instead of making use of public private partnerships where the incentive is to appeal to those in the private sector who think they can make the most money out of the public need for infrastructure, we should reinvent the original public public partnership. Under the latter, the State provide resources and local communities then identified needs and worked towards meeting them. There have been obvious difficulties with PPPs and these are partly related to the way in which the Government has provided resources and the fact that it has not provided sufficient resources. This is particularly true in the case of rural schemes and has given rise to problems as regards excessive amounts of contaminants such as fecal coliforms — levels of which have risen as high as 25% — in water supplies.
The approach we should take is not to establish a standalone body which could, in itself, be the prototype of another privatised agency. We should use the voluntary network and provide it with adequate resources to help it become as professional as possible in this era of higher environmental standards. We are concerned that the standalone body could develop into anything and that is why I am raising this point. It is at such a remove from the original principle and the existing philosophy of group water schemes that it must be challenged.
Even during the short period he has been in office, the Minister is beginning to obtain an indication of the sense of anger towards this legislation from those who administer group water schemes. These people believe the Bill to be an attack on what they are doing.
