Mr. Gerard O'Leary:

Chairman, we have supplied our presentation. I am going to read aspects of slide 17, which maps out where we were in 2014, where we were in 2016 and where we are today.

The existence of the boil water notice shows that the reality today is that the water quality is not good. That has been dropping, as Ms Burke pointed out, and there is a projection to get to zero by the end of 2020.

We have gone further and analysed all of the public water supplies. We are trying to identify where the issues are likely to be tomorrow and where the water supplies are not resilient enough. The 99 schemes currently in place represent 770,000 people who are at risk of being on some form of water restriction. We are playing catch up on 16 years of backlog, and that is also the picture with the urban wastewater treatment directive. Many of the deadlines were 2000 and 2005. The year 2000 was for the larger supplies. From the presentation it can be seen that the largest plant that we have in the country, at Ringsend, does not comply, which brings down our average. We are running at about 50%, whereas the rest of Europe, on the basic and urban wastewater, are in the 90%+ bracket. I am reluctant to speak too much about the stats because if Ringsend was compliant we would be in the 90% bracket as well. However, as Ms Burke pointed out, there were 43 years when if one flushed the toilet everything went into the aquatic environment.

From an EPA point of view we do not want those smaller areas left behind, because although they are small areas they have a lot of tourists. If I was to pick one, for example where I live in Wexford, there are playgrounds in Kilmore Quay adjacent to sites where there is raw sewage. We are keen that the job gets finished for the urban wastewater treatment directive. There is a greater list of 124, encompassing the small and the big. The whole preamble to the urban wastewater treatment directive was the protection of public health. In the case of urban wastewater there are 124 areas on the list.