Ms Laura Burke:

A wide range of people and organisations were involved in the review, including the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, an independent person who had been with the environmental protection agency in the Netherlands, Professor Anthony Staines from DCU, and Dick Budden, a member of Repak and managing director of Wellman, a recycling facility in Meath. I cannot remember the names of the other people involved, but they are all on the EPA website. It was a wide range of people, and they sought submissions from members of the public and other organisations on their views of the EPA. They received around 180 submissions and they brought in a number of people, including representatives of the Irish Environmental Network and the Environmental Forum from Limerick, to get their direct, oral feedback on the performance of the EPA. There was very wide consultation. It was independent, it was external and overall the findings with regard to the EPA were extremely positive.

We can advise on the number of inspections and visits. With regard to who does the inspections for the EPA, the EPA does the inspections itself for urban wastewater treatment facilities and industrial facilities. We have contracted out the auditing of some functions related to waste electrical goods, usually to shops, businesses and facilities like that. Their compliance with those regulations and some external air monitoring is also contracted out. We can give more detail on that in a moment.

On septic tanks and the inspections of septic tanks, it has clearly been assigned to the local authorities and the inspections are a local authority function. The EPA's role is to set out an inspection plan for the country and then it is up to the local authorities to do those inspections.

On Enva, we take all complaints to the EPA very seriously. We have done a full assessment with regard to Enva and can give more details on that. We have also done some ambient monitoring in the locality because there was concern that the air quality was being compromised. Ambient monitoring has demonstrated that all the air quality guidelines are being met in the locality.