Ms Maria Graham:

On the first question on the water debt, while the water debt of €600 million that was in place in 2013 was held by local authorities, from the general finances perspective it is part of Government debt. The decision was made that rather than transfer that to Irish Water, we would continue to finance it through the local government fund. About €450 million of that was with the Housing Finance Agency and €150 million with commercial lenders. The funding from the Housing Finance Agency was raised by the National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, so it was wound back into the NTMA, which is looking after that. We are continuing to give resources on an annual basis to local authorities on the commercial debt still outstanding as that is wound down. It comes out of the local government fund.

In terms of the operational savings, the business plan for Irish Water is €1.1 billion over the period of the plan to 2021. That is what it has said it can achieve, and it is held to account for that by the regulator, who may look for further savings beyond that.

The key feature in comparing the local authority system and the Irish Water system is that the regulator is looking over a multi-annual period whereas local authorities have operational budgets set by whatever financing they have on a year-by-year basis. The regulator is benchmarking, by international standards, to determine where operational costs should go over a period of time. It is a different perspective and a different way of going about it whereas a local authority, and some members of the committee may have been members of authorities, is dealing with a budget and what it has to do on a year-by-year basis. That is one of the key features.

In the note we gave members they will see that the operational spending in the years immediately prior to moving to Irish Water remained fairly steady even though there would have been pressure from new facilities coming on-stream. That reflects the fact that money was not going into capital maintenance. That is what the PricewaterhouseCoopers report I mentioned was referring to.

In terms of the rural water programme, the €114 million I mentioned is purely Irish Water. It is the extra funding we would have to give in this year. With regard to the €50 million I referred to, the subsidies to the rural water sector are approximately €24 million in 2017 and the rural water programme is of the order of €18 million. I was saying that in rough terms, between capital and current spending, we are talking about €50 million, but that is separate from the Irish Water funding.

In terms of how Irish Water was funded in 2016, we set out in our note at page 4 a table on the current funding. There is a subvention of €479 million. It got extra funding of €123 million to cover the suspension of domestic charges and it had working capital of €51 million but in the case of 2016, as Deputy Ó Broin pointed out, funding would have been allocated originally for the water conservation grant, which did not have to be used in that year. That was how the funding was provided. The capital contribution in 2016 was €184 million.