Ms Mary Gurrie:

There is a legacy of underinvestment in our sewage treatment. It is not where it should be and there is a lot of work and investment required to get it up to the scale required. The EPA has a priority action list and that is where we focus our enforcement activities, which is our priorities around raw sewage, compliance in wastewater treatment plants, freshwater pearl mussels and sites that are impacting on water quality. Those are the priority focuses, although there are other problems. That is where we address our enforcement actions, if Uisce Éireann has not responded in the timeline it has committed to or if there are delays or particular breaches. We can check whether there have been repeat prosecutions but my understanding is that in general the prosecutions are successful in focusing attention on that issue or the site that needs the upgrade and that there have been improvements on foot of prosecutions being taken by the EPA.