Mr. Thomas Carney:

I thank Deputy Conway-Walsh for her time. We appreciate it. We were told that applications had gone to Irish Water, which sounded good, but we became suspicious after months and years. We therefore submitted a freedom of information request, FOI, to Irish Water. We received a response that stated that flow capacity was a big issue. I asked if any studies had ever been done. The answer to that was that none had ever been done by the council or Irish Water.

In my time and in my father’s time, the river has never run dry. It is one of the major rivers there. That is why the treatment plant is built on that river. The treatment plant is within sight of my house. It is in the village. That is the sad part of it. The whole scheme is very short.

To return to the Deputy’s question, the only way we found out was when we paid the money to get the information from the council. It showed that no application had been filed. Once we prompted them via the freedom of information request, the application was then filed. It took that €331 to poke that along. That was one of three. We cannot keep funding it. Again, last week, I had to do another freedom information request to find out what is happening to our scheme. To the question, no application was filed and Irish Water proved that to be true. Irish Water has been responsive. That is where we are. I do not know where we are, because nobody knows.