Mr. John Tierney:

The main point Deputy Mulherin raised was about rural versus urban water services. Irish Water must come up with a 25-year investment plan for our long-term strategies. In addition, we are preparing a two-year capital investment plan in the short term and we will also have to prepare plans as part of the price control review with the regulator.

Efficiency should be interpreted as the ability to have money to spend on more relevant pieces of work that we need to carry out. I mentioned capital. For an annual spend of what would be €600 million today, if we had it, our target is to try to drive the output of that for about €450 million. That is the type of target we are setting ourselves. We have 2,000 water and wastewater treatment plants to manage, not one or two big ones. We have all of those other ones to manage. We want to put in place procedures and investment that gets to the ones that need to be dealt with quickest. On the next day we intend to give a more detailed outline of the asset management approach and some of the planning approach. That will cover some of the questions that have been raised by certain Deputies.

In terms of compliance, we have to deal with the EU and Irish law. We are already dealing with a serious legacy with the European Court of Justice, ECJ, case and also with issues relating to the Environmental Protection Agency.