IRELAND’S WATER protection strategy is “full of leaks”, an alliance of environmental groups said in advance of World Water Day today, which is dedicated by the UN to the theme of water quality.
The Sustainable Water Network (Swan), comprising 24 national and local environmental organisations, has called on Minister for the Environment John Gormley to defer approving “inadequate” river basin management plans.
The network held a protest outside Leinster House yesterday featuring an idyllic beach sullied by a pipe discharging sewage to highlight what it describes as the “lack of action to protect Ireland’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters”.
Swan spokeswoman Sinéad O’Brien said a recent Environmental Protection Agency report bore out the network’s concerns by showing increases in fish kills, a fall in the number of bathing water sites meeting EU standards and a “dramatic” drop in the percentage of high ecological river sites.
The aim of the river basin management plan is to manage water in an integrated way to prevent degradation of Ireland’s rivers, lakes and bays.
There are eight river basin districts on the island – four in the Republic, one in the North and three cross-Border.
“These plans, which are supposed to protect our rivers, lakes and bays, are wholly inadequate. Despite the fact that under law they must set out a management plan for all our waters, our coastal waters are being completely ignored. This is a disgrace given that we are an island nation and rely on clean coasts for fishing, business, recreation and tourism.”
Combined with poor wastewater treatment, Ms O’Brien said this meant that in more than 100 locations around the State, “raw or inadequately-treated sewage is flowing into our estuaries and bays”.
Swan aims to protect and enhance the quality of water through full participation by the environmental sector in the river basin management planning process, and through raising awareness of water issues and ensuring enforcement of water protection.
A spokesman for the Minister said that Mr Gormley was “more anxious than anybody” to put the river basin management plans in place, and his department was spending “more money than ever before on water infrastructure and on enforcement of regulations”.
However, Labour MEP Nessa Childers said that Mr Gormley’s failure to submit the plans to the European Commission before today’s deadline was “yet another case ... of the Government completely failing to meet an important deadline on a critical environmental issue”.
Fine Gael environment spokesman Phil Hogan TD said: “For all the endless talk and reports on building a ‘smart’ or ‘innovation’ economy, we can’t even get the simple things right like delivering clean water at a competitive price to end-users.”
He said the water delivery system was “fragmented, inefficient and outdated”, with 34 water authorities responsible for infrastructure, delivery and treatment operating in “near isolation from each other”.