Political pitch becomes ever muddier over water

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

My abiding childhood memory of winters in Galway was of parallel rain sheeting in from the bay over the Prom. There were few Irish records too in the Guinness Book of Records. One of them was that Ballinahinch in Connemara was the wettest place in the British Isles.

So if everything else failed in the world, water just did not seem to be an issue in Ireland.

But it is – on all kinds of levels; not just drinking water but also waste water and sewage.

There was a report in the paper that 43 urban centres in Ireland are still pumping raw sewage into the sea. One of those is Spiddal.

A decade ago there were reports in the paper saying that Spiddal was pumping raw sewage into the sea. Since than the situation hasn’t changed at all – except for one detail; Spiddal now is much bigger than it was then.

Besides those 43 urban centres there are countless places where there is waste treatment, where it isn’t good enough. And then there are countless smaller places where raw sewage is still being pumped where it should not be.

And that’s before we even get to drinking water.

It is true we get a lot of rain, but unlike other places, a surprisingly small percentage of it is absorbed and retained in wells – a lot of it runs off. For fresh water, we rely a lot on our river and lake systems, the big basins like the Shannon, the Liffey or the Corrib.

The pressures on the current system is close to breaking point. By 2050, the population along the East coast will have grown so much that an additional 330 million litres of water per day will be required, on top of the over 500 to 600 million litres being used daily now.

Dublin is quickly approaching desert city status. Its main source of water is the Liffey. But it is drawing so much on it now that the Liffey flow is only 40 per cent of what it should be.

The spare capacity of water in Dublin is eight per cent (compared to ten to 15 per cent in other European cities). If there’s a prolonged drought, the city’s going to be parched. That situation obviously can’t pertain into the future.

The obvious – if controversial – solution to extract water from the Lower Shannon at Parteen Basin and then pipe it to Dublin. The alternative is a very expensive desalination plan, using water taken from the Irish Sea.

On the other side of this, the quality of drinking water is comparatively good in Ireland generally but you are still getting boil notices operating in Roscommon, or really serious situations like the cryptosporidium outbreak in Galway a few years ago.

The bottom line with all of this is that huge investment is needed in water services over the coming decades. And no matter which way it happens, it’s ultimately the taxpayer who is going to foot the bill.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.