Ms Maria Graham:

It could be an equivalent amount. When PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC, examined the matter, it stated that we needed to be spending double our current expenditure in capital investment. In terms of water conservation, for example, the percentage of capital investment that modern utilities make over a decade in pipe renewal in order to achieve low leakage levels is much more significant than what we have had the capacity to do with Exchequer resources. The premise of establishing Irish Water is to provide a regulated utility with access to capital markets, allowing capital investment to be doubled and greater operational efficiency so that we might tackle leakages and infrastructural deficiencies. From a departmental policy perspective, there has been a realisation that, based on the assessment done by PwC, although there is a book value of €11 billion of local authority assets-----