Mr. Gerard O'Leary:

I will outline our approach to enforcement. We get intelligence from three sectors. We do our own audits, and gather water samples and air samples. The director general has outlined the numbers - 1,300 in total in 2013. We also collect information from residents and have a form on our website allowing people to report incidents to us online and we will investigate them. The licences demand a lot of the licensee in terms of monitoring and providing information to us. If there is an incident at the plant, for example, a breakdown of equipment or the breach of an emission limit value, they also have to report that to us. It is an offence not to report incidents to the EPA.

We carry out about 800 audits and inspections between industrial and waste activities. We risk-rank those. All our A sites in terms of industry and waste would receive more attention than the lower risk sites. We also have a national programme looking across the 800, collecting the intelligence from local communities, information we get from our audits and inspections, allowing us to come up with an EPA priority list. Already this year we have ten on our list. It is a dynamic list and as things improve they come off the list. Out of 800, ten are currently on our dynamic list and they are taking up about 15% of the resources allocated to us.

The director general has outlined the number of prosecutions. We had ten last year and we have had more this year. There are 156 outstanding in terms of court dates.

We have published two reports this year on the enforcement area. We did a focus on enforcement report looking back over three years. In the past two weeks we did a specific report on just air emissions because not all sectors would have to deal with air quality. We would have targeted the air quality areas. In both reports we have named and shamed companies either that we prosecuted or that consumed a lot of our time.

In terms of our overall enforcement approach, we want consistency across the sector and we want to implement the polluter pays principle.