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Around 98% of wastewater received at least secondary treatment, with only 2% receiving either primary or no treatment, in 2023.
Official Development Assistance (ODA) for water and sanitation was €0.8 million in 2023, down from €2.4 million in 2022.
Around 80% of households were connected to the public mains water supply in 2022, up from 77% in 2016.
Households connected to the public sewerage scheme accounted for 68.2% of all households in Census 2022, up from 65.9% recorded in Census 2016.
Good ambient water quality was recorded in 58% of water bodies in Ireland, based on the 2016-2021 Water Framework Directive (WFD) assessment.
Ireland's UN SDGs – Goal 6 Clean Water and Sanitation 2024 is an update of the previous publication in the series from the Central Statistics Office (CSO). These publications monitor and report on how Ireland is progressing towards meeting its targets under the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
The CSO works with government departments and other organisations to bring together the data required for reporting on Ireland’s SDGs. This collaboration is formalised under the SDG Data Governance Board, which meets on a quarterly basis. The report for Goal 6 was developed in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
This is the sixth report in this series and includes data for Ireland for each of the SDG indicators selected by the UN to measure Goal 6 Clean Water and Sanitation. Data are available at various levels of detail which include geography, gender, age group and other categories, where relevant, in accordance with the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics.
This report on Goal 6 has 11 indicators which are organised into three user friendly chapters:
The titles of these chapters are based around common themes in the eight targets which are measured in Goal 6.
The 17 UN SDGs are a set of global development targets adopted by the UN member countries in September 2015 to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. The UN SDGs are driving the global development agenda towards 2030 (Agenda 2030) and address global challenges including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The 17 goals are interconnected, and leave no one behind, the aim is to achieve them all by 2030. They recognise that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and help economic growth, while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.
The CSO, Ordnance Survey Ireland* (OSi) and Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri-Ireland) established a project team in April 2017 to engage with a combined UN Statistics Division (UNSD)/Esri research exercise with a goal to develop and deploy a new approach for monitoring the UN SDG Indicators using geographic information systems. The result of this exercise is a new website (Ireland's SDGs Data Hub), hosted on OSi's GeoHive platform, which is Ireland’s Central Portal for all SDGs and contains indicators data on the 17 UN SDGs for Ireland. All the indicators in this release will be loaded onto the GeoHive. This work has been formalised through the creation of Ireland’s Institute for SDGs (IIS) - an initiative between the CSO, OSi and Department of Environment, Climate and Communications (DECC). The membership of the IIS is expected to expand with ongoing monitoring and reporting of Ireland's progress towards meeting UN SDGs.
*Tailte Eireann is an independent Government agency formed by the merger of the Property Registration Authority (PRA), the Valuation Office and Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI), on 01 March 2023.
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Statistician's Comment
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (27 June 2025) published Ireland's UN SDGs indicators data for Goal 6 Clean Water and Sanitation 2024.
Commenting on the release, Mary Smyth, Statistician, said:
"This latest release on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) has data on 11 indicators for Ireland, divided over three chapters: Clean and Safe Water, Water Management, and Water Policies. Data are presented in categories relevant to the indicators and geographical location, where possible. The UN SDGs and their associated indicators are, by design, wide-ranging in their coverage. As a result, the Irish data is provided by a number of sources including government departments, official organisations, and international organisations such as the UN. This release for Goal 6 was developed in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with input from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.
The Results
Census of Population 2022 data for household water supply showed that 80% of all households were connected to the public mains supply. Group water schemes (public and private) accounted for 8% of domestic water supply, while private and other water sources accounted for 12% of households.
The Dublin local authority regions and Galway City had around 94% to 97% of households connected to the public mains supply. In Monaghan around 45% of households were connected to the public mains supply, the smallest percentage of any local authority in 2022.
Households connected to the public sewerage scheme accounted for 68.2% of all households in 2022. Individual septic tanks accounted for 25.4% of domestic sewerage facilities, while other sewerage systems accounted for 6.4% of households.
Large urban areas collectively generate 92% of Ireland’s urban wastewater. In 2023, there were 177 towns and cities in Ireland subject to the requirements of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive. Most of the towns and cities met the treatment and effluent quality standards but treatment at ten areas failed to comply with these standards.
Based on the 2016-2021 Water Framework Directive (WFD) assessment, good ambient water quality was recorded in 58% of water bodies in Ireland. The proportion of rivers with good ambient water quality was 50%, while 69% of lakes and 91% of groundwater bodies had a good ambient water quality.
In 2023, €0.8 million was spent on water and sanitation, 0.1% of the total ODA budget of €1.467 billion."