Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
Updated at 14.25pm
THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION has confirmed it plans to take Ireland to the Court of Justice of the EU for what it describes as a failure to ensure that urban waste water in 38 areas “is adequately collected and treated to prevent serious risks to human health and the environment”.
Under EU law, towns and cities are required to collect and treat their urban waste water. Untreated waste can put human health at risk and pollute lakes, rivers, coasts, soil and groundwater.
These are the 38 areas (or agglomerations, to use the Commission’s term) in question:
EU member states had until the end of 2000 to ensure appropriate treatment of wastewater from large urban areas (with a population of over 15,000).
Countries were given until 2006 to properly treat discharges from medium-sized areas and discharges into freshwater and estuaries from smaller areas.
The Commission, which is the EU’s independent executive arm, initiated its case against Ireland four years ago and followed up with warnings in 2015 and last year.
Elsewhere in its announcement today the Commission said it was also concerned “about the failure to ensure that a correct operating licence has been issued for the treatment plants serving the agglomerations of Arklow and Castlebridge”.
A recent Commission report found that Ireland faced a major challenge maintaining investments required for water services.
Separately, the Environmental Protection Agency said yesterday as it launched its annual report that “substantial and sustained capital investment is required to deliver improved water infrastructure in Ireland”.
Possible fine
If Ireland is found to be at fault by the Court of Justice of the EU, it will be issued with a further warning to comply with the law or risk a second case being brought, which may result in a fine.
Irish Water, established in 2013, brought together the water services of 31 local authorities. Since then, successive ministers have stressed the need for householders to pay water charges in order to boost investment in water infrastructure – however, the issue has effectively been parked in the wake of a major protest movement and is now being considered by an Oireachtas committee.
Irish Water said in a statement to TheJournal.ie that it had put in place “a prioritised range of projects to deal with historic deficits and lack of investment in wastewater treatment across the country.
The utility has identified key projects in our current and recently approved future capital investment plans to address all non-compliances in our treatment plants by 2021 in each of the areas identified by the EU as part of this ECJ case. This element of our investment programme will exceed €1 billion.
We are also carrying out detailed studies into a number of issues raised by the EU in relation to our wastewater collection systems (network overflows) and full compliance for our networks will take longer, extending into the next investment programme.
The Department of Housing Community and Local Government said it noted today’s announcement from the Commission, adding:
We have been actively engaged with the EU Commission, Irish Water and the EPA in relation to the infringement since it was first formally notified by the EU Commission in October 2013.
We provided the Commission with details of the operational and investment plans in place to ensure compliance, including the timeline for compliance for each urban area. Significant capital investment is needed to ensure compliance. This has been identified in the Irish Water Investment Plan covering the period 2017 to 2021, and the works needed to address the infringement will be progressed during this period.
Over this period, Irish Water plan to invest €1.7 billion in waste water projects, programmes and asset maintenance. In addition, Drainage Area Plans for waste water collection systems will be completed for 44 urban areas by 2021 with the prioritisation of plans based on ensuring compliance with the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive and meeting other environmental objectives.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
The €500,000,000 spent on meters which the government were told weren’t needed would have been far better spent tackling this issue.
€650 per meter. How much do you think it should cost?
@Imnotrodten: Straw man in the extreme.
I’m just interested in seeing how much people thought they should cost. Not even making an argument.
@Imnotrodten – from memory Siemens offered them f.o.c. if they won the contract, and they wouldn’t be the cheap junk ones IW actually paid for…..
Firstly all that start-up money came from our taxes and was squandered. Second, there are methods to detect water leaks already. What a joke it would be if the only way to find out how many use public transport was to have every household clock in and out. They could buy machines for each house, install them, run media campaigns and hire consultants. Sure how else could politicians waste money?
So nobody has any idea how much we should have paid
We should have paid nothing Siemens offered New ones for free. Instead we paid millions for second hand junk.
@Imnotrodten: Well, we didn’t need them in the first place, so we should have paid €0 for water meters. Even if we did need them, they had been offered to us free of charge. In that case, we should have paid €0 for water meters. This has been explained to you over and over again. Either you can’t read or you have a problem grasping simple concepts.
Do you really think Siemens were doing it for free? Praise jesus. The water meters installed were new and not second hand.
€650 for something ze Germans deemed useless – so Ireland bought a schkite of them?
Well, they have form in standing up to the EU commission now with the Apple ruling and the VRT, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
@Louis Jacob:
Spot on, no problem paying fines to the EU when it suits them look at the VRT Ruling
@conriel: We pay the fines, not the FG/FF government and it’s the citizens who pay the price.
@Louis Jacob: They’re trying to comply with the EU Commission’s water directive; it’s the anti-water charge protesters who have made that politically unsustainable. Looking after the environment has become mainstream. It’s no longer a left-wing thing. Ironically, it’s now the alt-left, anti-establishment movements like AAA/PBP and Right2Water who are preventing Ireland from having the sort of policies we need to protect our water supply and environment.
where does the water charge money go to? cause it certainly doesn’t seem to be going to cleaning it
@James O Carroll: Sending out bills, a fleet of Audi A6s, water meters which weren’t needed, adverts on the radio about how wonderful Irish water is…..and so on
It goes to the people who are paid to collect it.
Bond holders?
Consultants?
Government pay rises?
Dinny
@James O Carroll: I think it goes here:
http://www.thejournal.ie/29-irish-water-staff-are-earning-over-e100000-1279724-Jan2014/
@James O Carroll: John Fizgerald said there are 2000 people to many working in Irish Water and the extra costs amount to 1.5 – 2 Billion Euro.
https://www.rte.ie/news/2014/0127/500350-irish-water/
@James o Carroll, this is decades of diverting of deserving money from the cleaning up the environment. The cost whether it’s metering or not has to be paid. They have shown that ignoring the problem doesn’t work and now they are prepared to waste money on fines. 17 years of ignoring this is very arrogant.
@Melissa O’Callaghan: @Louis Jacob: To be fair to the government they’re trying to comply. it’s the ‘don’t care about the pollution, we’re not paying’ water protesters who won’t let it happen.
I won’t be paying any water charges I dunno about the rest of you!
OK freeloader. Do what makes you happy. It’s all about you
I have an apartment and a house, I got the two water grants. I won’t be paying either. I’ll buy a few pints with the 200 euro
@cholly appleseed: I wont be paying any water charges either because I already pay nearly half my wages to the Government and i get zero in return. Freeloader me h0le..
Good for you Gary! A lone voice in the crowd.
You should leave the taps on while you are in the mood.
You are rich Ciarán, supposedly you are not paying enough (c) vincent browne, fintan o’toole etc.
He’s hardly a freeloader if he’s already paying for it like most of us
Sure they don’t like what EU commission say these days. They showed that with the apple case. So expect them to rigourous fight the EU on this.
@LITTLEONE:
EU – FU
@Charles Martel: EU,ROME and a DAY.
@LITTLEONE: They’re not fighting the EU on it. The EU’s directives are designed to protect our environment and water supply. It’s the water protesters who are fighting it.
Maybe if we established a water utility and metered water usage and invested in the infrastructure we could avoid these fines
@Nick Allen: Strawman. England is metered and they use more water per capita than we do. Investing in infrastructure instead of meters would have been a much better idea, no?
@Nick Allen: good idea, Nick.
Why didn’t anyone think of that before?
@Ciaran O’Mara:
The best ideas often take time to come up with.
So what if they use more water than use, means nothing really
@For Connolly:
As a short term measure then obviously the money would have been better spent on the infrastructure, I don’t think that anyone can deny that. However, as a long term solution we need to do something about our water system to make it sustainable. What happens in 30 years time when we need to reinvest in our water infrastructure? Also, and I appreciate there are differing views on this but I believe that we should introduce some sort of measure to encourage people not to waste water.
Not surprised to see Enniscorhty on the list, you should see some of the things floating down river.
Out of 1000 Irish people, 58% admitted to flushing baby wipes down the toilet, 40% facial wipes, 26% cotton bud sticks, 24% tampons and 21% cigarette butts. 94% said that they never read the label on their bleach container regarding volume.
TheJournal published this http://www.thejournal.ie/things-irish-people-flush-toilet-2145451-Jun2015/
@Nick Allen: Would like to see our, ‘elected officials’ lure a foreign investor with the promise of a tax break.
Also create some subsidies for new companies offering ‘innovative’ filtration systems, probably best to have
their board of directors made up of elected officials too, just to keep an eye on things. Plenty of room for plastic,
pharma’, health insurance in there aswell.
Perhaps if we were allowed to run our own country it might be a start instead of being dictated to by a former East German that’s so respected in the world the U S had to tap her phone in case she was a Russian sleeper
I don’t fancy your chances. There’s a lot of people out there who seem to think that we already pay for water in our taxation. They don’t realise that our water is inalienably ours but we need to treat it, both before and after we use it. Our taxation system is so stretched that our Gardaí, our teachers, our nurses and our public transport system are either close to or in crisis due to lack of funding so there is no money for providing the level of treatment our water needs. But these people won’t participate because the have “rights”, they have principles and they won’t pay.
@Shea Fitzgerald:
Why do people find that concept do challenging
@john g mcgrath: Yeah sure, because it’s Europe’s fault we’re incapable of cleaning up after ourselves
And yet according to UK pro-privatisation sites, poor old Britain has less water than any other European country. Imagine that. Seriously, think about that for a lie. Proud that the Irish people saw through the scam from the start.
Imagine if a wire mesh could catch debris. Make it out of scrap metal from e-voting machines. I’d say that would cost another 55 million to set up.
Well Nick, I can’t say for certain but I have my suspicions that at the root of it all is the rebellious dumbf*ckery gene which causes people to think that it’s ok to drive the wrong way on a oneway street if you reverse (facing the right direction!) or that trying to grab a submachine gun from an Italian soldier was ‘just a lad having a bit of craic’. Unable or unwilling to understand the problem and therefore unable to form an appropriare response and ….”Here, I have rights!!!!”
So shea the solution is another tax??
Shea Fiztgerald. The dumbf*ckery would be paying twice or more. But you go ahead. You poor fool.
If it were to be a system where you pay for what you use, I wouldn’t call it a tax. The money for tackling the problem has to come from somewhere. Of course, it should be structured to take into account people who are able to afford less. The way it has been handled up to now needs to be completely overhauled and we do need to establish the absolute ownership of the water in Ireland by the people, at a constitutional level if necessary.
Genuine question for those who are saying it’s all about privatisation – would you be in favour of water charges in some shape or form if it was a guaranteed national asset? Bearing in mind that we currently want things all our own way – no rates or direct charges on things but to keep a low general tax rate yet pay for everything from it.
Most likely outcome currently is nationalisation followed by some sort of unmetered charging scheme given the massive unpopularity of water meters. Meters would still be needed from an infrastructural point of view for system monitoring and leak detection but at district level rather than per household. It might end up like the bin charges, there’s an option for flat rate or by weight (metered).
Geoff. Genuine answer we already pay. Now what do people like you want us to do.Pay again?
@ray.farrelly:
Paying for a utility is not a tax.
Nick Allen. Show me where I said it was a tax?
@ray.farrelly:
Saying we already pay is akin with thinking it is a good idea to sign up for a pyramid scheme.
Nick Allen.I would say you would fall for the pyramid scam just like you fell for the water scam. But hey you just keep flogging the dead duck.
@Geoff: We should be paying for everything, we should own everything, and maybe
in 60 years time people wont have to shed €50 to see a doctor or thousands to drive
their kids to a creche to pay hundreds to mind them while we go to work to pay to keep
scores of other people in jobs they don’t want to do that simply make a small number
of people have more. Private companies should beg us for their business…
Never happen tho. We don’t learn quick enough before it all starts again.
@John Slade: So you don’t think it’s worth paying to fix the pollution because the world isn’t perfect. I don’t see that changing anytime soon so it’s the perfect excuse.
@Ronan Shalloe: Sorry, you lost me. We should also own any waste removal and
invest heavily in high-speed trains and not more crazy road schemes that cost billions
to keep us all forking out for more of the same to our over-loards, oil, insurance,
car companies. I’d gladly pay more for a train that can get to Dublin quicker than
I can drive it! the property market might relax a bit, maybe less traffic for those that
do live on the outskirts, I’d get more work done! But yeah, it wont change, we don’t want
it too, we’re the most conservative country in the area! If guns wer legal we’d be Texas!
Now get the F€ck out of my politics! *loads shotgun* (joke).
Serious question rather than just Irish Water bashing.
From 1998 to 2005, practically the whole of Cork was dug up to provide a new sewerage and treatment system.
How is it that less than 20 years after that was started we are now told that waste water in Cork is inadequately collected?
Planned obsolescence? Did [redacted] have the contract by any chance?????
Yet people were out protesting about Irish Water who weren’t in existence then. Why weren’t they out protesting about all the waste of resources by local authorities? Including all those employees that Irish Water said weren’t actually needed?
Tell the EU where to go.italy and France got big fines,and just before the UK referendum they were cancelled,to show the EU is a friendly union,you couldn’t make it up.
Control a nations water and you control that nation. Privatistion is the bottom line here make no mistake about it.
About time they cleaned uo, the crap the council pump into our waterways is disgusting.
Paul – the river Brosna between Mullingar and Lough Ennell where grass grows on top of the water due to discharge from the local water treatment plant. Cleaned in December and grass back already.
Watch them row in with the EU on this but yet fight them on the apple tax
Is this all Ervia?
Thats funny what was Irish Water supposed to do again ?
IW was supposed to make serious money for private investors. Not do basic things for boring taxpayers.
The Irish people getting mighty peed off at the selective fines to be paid by FG… CORRUPTED shower of Bast@#£&
Irish Water are all over Limerick doing botch jobs fitting meters under the guise of replacing lead pipes.
Tried to get a group scheme going here in Meath. Screwed no there’s no water charge to fund it..
have your say