Ms Clare McGrath:

I am concerned Chairman. The pilots were about asking ourselves how we would do the national CFRAM and how would we learn from our experience. It was not about how we would we deliver a scheme for an individual project. We were working on the plan that would be needed to deliver for the country as a whole. We need to learn from our pilot projects. We were not clear as to what the process might be. We were doing the pilots in a number of different ways to discover the ideal process. The Chairman asked about extrapolating from the estimates we did on the pilot projects in order to obtain a picture in respect of the national programme of projects and my response is that we are within the figure of €30 million plus VAT for the 300 projects. We have learned from the pilot projects and we can then say that we will proceed on the basis that the overall cost will be a certain figure.

I will now address the specific questions relating to the River Lee project. The draft plan for the River Lee was delivered in 2009 and was capable of being published in 2010. As we all know, there was a flood event in 2009 on the River Lee. This made us pause our pilot project instead of proceeding as planned. We had to take on board the information relating to that event and learn from it. We had been looking at flooding from the tidal perspective. This was fluvial flooding and there were complications in the hydraulic modelling of that event. It was complicated. The consultants were involved in coming up with modelling, because we had to take account of the impact of the dam. There was a great deal more work in the hydraulic modelling that arose after the delivery of the draft plan. We were piloting a project that would be part of the way we would deliver on national projects. I accept that we could have documented some of the work we were doing on this project in order to be able to report that documentation which had given rise to making us pause. From the perspective of where we have got to in respect of the national projects, and where we are today in terms of the long-term management of flood risk in this country, what we did was right.