£420m boost for water schemes

The Government is to revamp grant schemes and subsidies for group water schemes. There will be a £420 million package to overcome pollution of supplies.

The Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, has signalled, however, that changes will be tied into new conditions requiring schemes to achieve strict quality standards and operate under professional supervision.

The move is a response to increasing EU pressure to get hundreds of schemes up to standard, and a threat of legal action by the European Commission because of its concerns about the extent of pollution in Irish rural drinkingwater supplies.

This pressure has intensified since the publication in November of the latest Environmental Protection Agency report on Irish drinking water. It found 42 per cent of 5,500 schemes (supplying about a fifth of the State's households) were contaminated, two-thirds of which had faecal coliforms (bacteria indicating presence of sewage or farm wastes such as slurry).

Speaking in Co Monaghan, Mr Dempsey said the quality of group schemes was now one of the major issues in rural Ireland today. He accepted that two-thirds of supplies needed upgrading because of "urgent and serious water quality deficiencies". The law was recently changed to bring schemes within the remit of the EU Drinking Water Directive.

He said an improved financial package and capital programme for investment this year was being finalised with the Department of Finance. The new package would address the adequacy of capital grants and subsidies in a fair and pragmatic way and ensure schemes could afford to disinfect or filter water before distribution.

He would be insisting that, as part of any improved grants package, satisfactory operational and maintenance systems would be in place. "With quality the bottom line, an improved subsidy regime would also have to be linked to a formal commitment by groups to achieve and maintain Drinking Water Directive standards," the Minister said.

A spokesman for the National Federation of Group Water Schemes, Mr Bernard Keeley, welcomed the move which, he said, was in line with recommendations from the National Rural Water Monitoring Committee. It was recognition that if people were to be made legally accountable for their schemes, "they need money to bring standards up" in the first place. The federation was seeking 100 per cent grant aid for treatment works and 85 per cent for all other works.