The State’s water and sewerage systems “are in a desperate state” because of “extraordinary complacency” and “passive indifference” around investment in infrastructure, Uisce Éireann chairman, Jerry Grant, has said.
The goal of building 50,000 homes could not be met unless there was a “new approach from the Government” and “leadership from the very top” in developing water services, Mr Grant said.
The single pipe that serves 40 per cent of Dublin from the Ballymore Eustace water treatment plant in Kildare could “blow up in the morning”, he said, and the scheme to take water from the Shannon to serve the capital is unlikely to be completed in less than a decade, despite its requirement being confirmed almost 30 years ago.
Uisce Éireann has “no mandate” to provide for future housing growth, something which was “very poorly understood and very often misrepresented”, Mr Grant told a conference on sustainable urban regeneration this week.
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The water utility had a €10.2 billion five-year investment plan, he said, but this was designed to achieve water and wastewater compliance, replace ageing and failing assets and build resilience in the system.
“We have no mandate to service land for growth. That’s regarded as speculative development and it has to be self-funded by developers.”
Mr Grant said Uisce Éireann was not oblivious to the need for housing. “The challenge of delivering 50,000 houses per annum is very clearly understood by ourselves,” he said, adding that it needed a “new mandate from Government”, new funding and a reduction in the governance and consent processes which were “blocking” services from being put into the ground.
Uisce Éireann “does not and will not be the determinant of where people live” but it had assessed 48 major urban centres where investment in water services could facilitate the delivery of up to 300,000 houses over a five-year period.
This could not be achieved, however, if there was an expectation water systems would be put “into every town and village in the country”. Mr Grant said: “That’s not realistic, it doesn’t make sense, it’s not economical, and it would lead to stranded assets all over the place.”
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In a hard-hitting address to the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland and Academy of Urbanism conference in Dublin, Mr Grant said water supplies for the Dublin region had been “bled to the point where we are at the limit of sustainability”.
“We have a single pipeline that delivers 40 per cent of all the water for Dublin. That is 50 years old. We know there’s about 25 leaks on it. It could blow up in the morning and cause us massive difficulty. We’ve got to replace that very, very quickly.”
The need for another water supply for the capital had been identified 29 years ago but legislation for the river Shannon abstraction scheme was only recently enacted, he said. “We need it delivered as soon as possible. At the moment, it’s hard to see it being delivered in less than 10 years.”
Risks to the capital’s sewerage system were “just as bad”, he added.
The municipal waste water treatment plant at Ringsend had reached “the limit of what we can get in there”.
Permission for a new north Dublin plant was granted in 2019 but was subject of a judicial review and referred back to An Bord Pleanála for a new decision, which had yet to be issued.
“That Dublin drainage project was estimated at around €650 million in 2018. Today, it’s €1.3 billion. That’s the cost of delay but it’s only part of the cost of delay.” This is because it meant Uisce Éireann “cannot permit development” in large parts of north and north west Dublin “where most of the development potential is”.
“People have formulated the plans, but we don’t seem to take them seriously or take ownership of delivery until the point of desperation. I am here now saying [that] we are now in this desperate state because we haven’t acted more quickly.”
