Mr. Jerry Grant:

Thank you. I will try to give a fairly brief overview of what is a very substantial, strategic and long-term project for Irish Water and the country. This project has a long provenance, it was first identified as a long-term requirement in 1996 when the strategic requirements for the eastern region, and particularly the greater Dublin area, were looked at. It is useful to reflect on the history of water supplies in the region. The Vartry scheme was first built in 1870 following an act of the British Parliament. In its time is absolutely transformed public health in this city. I think that the average life expectancy at the time was about 46 years and death from cholera and dysentery, especially child mortality, was huge. That scheme was extraordinarily transformative in its time. In the 1940s the ESB built the Poolaphouca impoundment; at the time it was built not only for hydroelectric but with provision for further water supplies for Dublin. It provided the basis for development of the region for the period since then. Today the big water treatment plants at Ballymore Eustace and and Leixlip abstract 40% of the total flow in the River Liffey for the greater Dublin area, which is quite an extraordinary level of abstraction, and frankly at the limit of what is sustainable. Currently, Vartry needs €150 million to bring it up to modern standards, both in terms of treatment and integrity. A huge amount of money is being invested in the Dublin system and in the eastern region system, but the reality is that within ten years there will be a shortage and that shortage has to be met with a big decision to provide a new major water supply for the region.

On the approach that is being taken, in the short term for the next ten years, there is about 8% headroom in the Liffey schemes which is very tight in the context of a growing region with a strong economic growth again. We will need to save substantial water from leakage which will take a massive effort given the types of pipework that we have and the age of much of it - there is about 2,000 km of old cast iron and a lot of very poor more modern pipe, especially cement and PVC. There will be a huge effort by Irish Water in recovering leakage year on year over the next ten years to ensure that we do not have a problem until we can develop a new major source. For the long term, after years of investigation and four rounds of non-statutory public consultation, we have arrived at the view that a scheme based on the River Shannon, abstracting from Parteen basin, is the most sustainable long-term solution and will provide for the needs of the eastern and midland regions of the country long into the future.

A new supply clearly gives us the capacity to have sustainable water capacity in the entire region which caters for 40% of the national population. That overall supply will then be resilient for things such as climate effects, changes in summer rainfall and so on, all of which are significant risks at the moment if we did nothing. Obviously there is significant social and economic growth potential in the region, that includes both FDI and indigenous industry, all of which need a certainty of sustainable supplies. Critically, it would give the region the kind of headroom or security against things going wrong such as the failure of a plant, the failure of a pipeline, pollution of a source or that the supply does not come down and cause a major difficulty. On the consequences of failure, the economic assessments which we had carried out as part of the project indicated that a day of a shut-down in water supply to the Dublin region would cost a minimum of €78 million in economic loss, but obviously reputational damage would impact on our ability to attract industry, for example, and indeed the confidence of the country would be severely shaken, so it is critically important that we ensure long-term supplies.

We have provided members with figures for population projections using median CSO predictions but extending them out to 2050. Obviously, in a project like this, one looks well beyond the normal demographic projections because this is a project that will be multi-generational and therefore one has to look as far as one can into the future. In that context we have projected an increase in the greater Dublin area of about 640,000 people and a further 160,000 people in the benefiting corridor across the midlands, which gives an idea of the kind of population requirement. Obviously, that is matched by the potential commercial non-domestic demand and we have also factored in, in discussions with the IDA and others, a reasonable provision for strategic capacity and we recognise how critical that can be when it comes to multinational industries trying to decide between countries where water can be a determining factor.

There is a multiplicity of small schemes dotted around the region and over the next 20 years we will be looking to eliminate a great deal of those because many of them are unsustainable and many of them are poor quantity sources or indeed sources that are vulnerable to pollution where it is very difficult for us to ensure the quality. In time, we see the larger schemes gradually eliminating many of the smaller schemes as we aggregate them to bigger schemes and we can provide the kind of level of treatment that is considered appropriate nowadays.

On the solution, after looking at many options, I think there were ten significant options looked at in the beginning. These were gradually narrowed down and eventually it came down to a choice between the River Shannon and desalination. Ultimately, that decision came down, to a large extent, to both the benefits of the Shannon scheme, as an option, and the running cost. The long-term economic cost of desalination is enormous by comparison. The decision to transfer water from the Shannon basin to the eastern region had to be on the basis that the benefit to one community could not be at the expense of another, it could not be at the expense of the Shannon communities. To prove that, we examined various options on the Shannon from Loughrea down to northern Lough Derg and ultimately ended up in Parteen basin on the basis of the storage and control which the ESB can exercise at that point. It is possible to take water without any impact on either levels, in Lough Derg, because they are controlled within the normal operating regime that the ESB use, or indeed any loss of amenity benefit or ecological benefit because the water has already passed through the entire Shannon system. That means that in developing a pipeline corridor from there to Peamount and the western side of Dublin where they would integrate to the Dublin network. That pipeline evolved over a long period, again looking at options, marking out all of the things that needed to be considered, barriers such as the communities where people were living, woodland, conservation areas, mountains and so on. This ultimately came down to a number of corridors and was gradually tightened down to a 1 km corridor and then to 200 m.

Members have been given an aerial view of the Ardnacrusha dam. It shows the old river and dam which controls 10 m3/s which continually goes down the old river. The balance of the flow which averages 170 m3/s goes down through Ardnacrusha and is used for generation. The proposition is that to achieve full development of the scheme in 2050 would take up to 4 m3/s which reduces the amount of water going down through Ardnacrusha to 166 cubic meters and the 4 cubic meters would be diverted to water supply, so it is a very small proportion of the water that is currently used for power generation.

On the pipeline, Mr. O'Sullivan can speak in more detail later about the discussions with individual landowners and the process by which we are engaging with the landowning community. We had a broad corridor within which we are now settling on a 50 m wayleave; that is the construction width. There is still tweaking going on with that in consultation with individual landowners. That process will continue for another six weeks or so, and then, during the following months, we will have very detailed engagements around activities on farms and the impacts on the work with a view to coming up with proposals that we can address and compensation in each individual case. We have had people on the ground for about 12 months, looking at the issues, agricultural and so on. The starting position is to find the least impactive route and then to work on the impacts of that on people and communities.

The slide shows an English pipeline, which is the only long distance pipeline of this scale. It demonstrates, broadly speaking, the kind of impact during construction which is significant. It is a 50 m width. The construction period at any particular section could be for 12 months but there is a significant recovery period as well while the land returns to full production. The slide on our PowerPoint presentation shows land with a Bord Gáis pipeline after it has been restored and has gone back to full productivity. We are following the practice that Bord Gáis developed well. It came up with comprehensive codes of practice for the way the work should be done, particularly how it impacts on farms of different kinds of farming activity, drainage, groundwater management, final reinstatement and the quality of same.

Ms Claire Coleman can give the committee more detail on the pre-consultation processes. This is the third round of intensive public non-statutory consultation as part of the process of eliciting the issues which need to be considered. We have come to the end of that process. Each time all of the submissions have been considered, we have responded to all of them. They certainly played a significant part in the evolution of this project. We hope to go for planning application to An Bord Pleanála at the back end of this year. In that subsequent process, there will be a statutory public consultation process to which everybody will have access, and ultimately, to what will be a substantial oral hearing. Assuming all that goes well and we have an approved scheme sometime in 2019, we hope to continue to develop the scheme with a view to construction between 2021 and 2024.

There is without question a significant deficit facing the region in the medium term unless we make provision for significant additional water resources. It is a challenge previous generations had to face in the 1860s and the 1940s. Due to the far-seeing projects put in place at those times, we have had the benefit of significant development, as well as social and economic progress. We are now at a stage where we need another scheme on that scale to secure the future of the eastern and midlands region. We are in the process of preparing a national water resources plan for the entire country. This will be published in draft for public consultation at the back end of this year. This particular area had much work done already and the scheme is being brought ahead. We will be looking at long-term secure water supply provision and how it will fit in with the water framework directive and river basin management across the country.