Mr. Jerry Grant:

In explaining that, it is important to look at some examples. In the next five years, we will basically be involved in upgrading water and wastewater treatment plants to meet the compliance targets for safe drinking water, as well as meeting basic requirements for treating wastewater to the required standards. We will be dealing with leakage and will be meeting growth requirements. We will do practically nothing in those five years to deal with some of the old culverts which are under Dublin, Cork, Waterford and Limerick, and which are leaking salt water and freshwater. We are pumping that to treatment plants and it is making matters both difficult and expensive . Very little of the work will get done, but we are spending money on investigating the position so that we can quantify the priorities and define where they will be.

In the second period from 2022 to 2025 or 2026, we are suggesting that a major new water source for Dublin will be required. We are also suggesting that a major new north Dublin drainage scheme will be required because we will have reached the limit of what the arterial system serving Ringsend can now deliver. These are the kind of examples about which we are talking.

The sum of €13.5 billion was based on using a standard pricing tool against all the upgrades that we can now identify as being needed across the country's entire asset base. The sum of €5.5 billion is set out between now and 2021. We will give that to the regulator in tranches of expenditure or periods that the regulator will examine. For example, we have a two-year period from 2017 to 2018 that the regulator has looked at in detail. The following period will hopefully be for five years. We will submit that five-year period for detailed scrutiny, including the projects we have prioritised, and so on for the succeeding periods. In its own time, each period will be sent forward as part of a prioritised package to be scrutinised in detail. The €13.5 billion is our current view looking at the entire landscape of things we need to do, including, for example, the old Victorian sewers and water mains that need to be replaced. All of those projects are aimed at getting leakage down to at least 25% and arguably as close to 20% as we can get. That means getting rid of cast iron and asbestos cement. It basically means getting our assets up to the level where instead of an average age of 70 or 80 years, we get it down to 25 or 30 years.