Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-06-12-Speech-1-123"
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"en.20060612.18.1-123"2
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"Mr President, I would like to emphasise a few points about groundwater which we have to keep in mind, even at this stage. The distinction between groundwater and surface water is not always clear. Water is not neatly compartmentalised in every location, so where these sources of water are linked, where they mingle, polluted surface water will pollute groundwater and vice versa.
The pollution of ground and surface water is a concern in my constituency of Munster, particularly in view of environmental disasters like the deserted tailings pond in Silvermines, County Tipperary, the red mud and salt lake ponds which get bigger every day at Aughinish, an alumina extraction factory in Limerick, and Kilworth, North Cork, where liquid toxic waste is dumped in trenches and left to seep into the earth. Another concern is that Irish governments have systematically polluted surface and groundwater for the past 40 years in the water fluoridation programme, with the daily addition of hexafluorosilic acid, a bio-accumulating toxin.
But there is another issue that we should take seriously. In this proposed directive, we deal with quality standards and pollutant levels in groundwater. However, we seem to waive sensible levels if the pollutant occurs naturally in groundwater. No matter how much of the pollutant is in the water, we seem to want to call that the baseline, the acceptable level. This will not work. Just because something is natural, it does not necessarily mean it is healthy. This mistake was made in India in 1970s and 1980s, in attempting to solve water shortages. International development funds were spent boring a large number of deep wells. The wells supplied a lot of water, but babies in the vicinity of many of those wells were born with congenital bone malformations. Skeletal diseases began to afflict the children and the adult populations too. Many of the wells had to be closed. The water was natural, but that did not make it safe. It had a significant content of fluoride that had no time to filter through the layers of mineral rock, which would have bound the fluoride to stabilising minerals like calcium, making them less toxic and less absorbable. A hundred years ago, people thought that water that was highly, if naturally, radioactive, was good and flocked to spas to drink and bathe in it. At first it made them feel wonderful, then it made them ill and then it killed them.
Is it not possible that, theoretically, an industry with a particular type of toxic discharge could choose to locate itself in an area that had naturally polluted but natural groundwater? We should consistently base our acceptable levels of polluting substances on what is acceptable, that is, what is safe and non-polluting and what is healthy if the water is to be drunk."@en1
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