Greens: Government must act on continual decline in water quality

Following today’s EPA report on the deteriorating quality of water in Ireland’s rivers, lakes and estuaries, the Green Party is calling on the government to ramp up investment in enforcement and to address systemic failures by Uisce Éireann and other state bodies to adequately protect our watercourses. 

The Party’s Spokesperson for Nature, Heritage, Agriculture and the Marine, Senator Malcolm Noonan, said that despite investment made by the last government through the Water Action Plan, there needs to be a step change in how we treat our watercourses or we risk an irreversible decline in biodiversity and a threat to human health and wellbeing.

“Our rivers, lakes and estuaries are facing a perfect storm of challenges, with increasing temperatures and drought making them more susceptible to even small loads of pollution or runoff. When the Greens were in government we increased investment in schemes for farmers to carry out on-farm measures, along with employment of local authority inspectors and implementing a catchment-scale approach. The current Government promised a laser focus on improving water quality to help retain our nitrates derogation and a cabinet sub-committee to oversee this. Has it met? If so, what is it doing? We need to know.”

He said that at a local level, every pollution source must be addressed through rigorous enforcement and, if necessary, revocation of Integrated Pollution Control (IPC) licences for repeat offenders. Pointing to the recent fish kill on the river Blackwater, Senator Noonan said inadequate sanctions on persistent polluting industries were effectively an endorsement of their actions.

Green Party leader, Roderic O’Gorman TD said: “I was in Kilkenny in 2024 to launch our National Water Action Plan.It should be the template for a systematic, catchment by catchment approach to cleaning up our act. Establishing Community Catchment Forums across the country, combined with strict enforcement and money from government to support positive interventions is the only way forward, but we saw little in Budget 2026 to indicate that government is taking this challenge seriously.” 

"There was no new money for nature, the budget for water quality remained static, and we heard more waffle on the derogation with very little urgency on addressing the declining quality of water bodies,” Senator Noonan concluded.