Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

No, it is okay. I thank the witnesses for their answers so far. I have three questions. First, I wish to follow up on the Senator's question about the cost of pursual versus the cost of refunds. Clearly, that would not have been included in the original Irish Water business plan because nobody would have expected us to end up where we are. Has the Department started establishing costs? Are there discussions between the Department and Irish Water to establish those costs? Clearly, if a committee such as ours was neutral on the substantive issues and was trying to decide on refunds versus pursuals, that kind of financial information would be pretty important to us in at least determining which was more cost-effective.

I have asked the second question before but I am still none the clearer. Group water schemes receive an annual subsidy but that does not cover the full annual cost of accessing the water supply. Therefore if the expert group's recommendations that ordinary household use for those people connected to the water supply who are currently customers of Irish Water do not pay an annual charge for accessing that supply, equity would mean that the State would cover the full annual cost of group water scheme users accessing that water supply. That would be obvious. I have asked via parliamentary questions if we know what that cost would be. We know the annual subvention cost is around €24 million, but does the Department have figures for the total cost of those group water schemes? I know they can vary from scheme to scheme. What is the distribution concerning the three different grant levels of €90, €140 and €220? It would be useful to have that information when we are in private session next week making some of these deliberations.

My last question is related to equity but it is not in the expert group's recommendations. It concerns the issue of water poverty. We heard from Welsh Water that they have significant levels of water poverty. Officials figures show that 15% of households live in fuel poverty across the State, but in counties with a higher percentage of older people it goes up to about 19%, for example, in Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan. We are not at the top end of EU fuel poverty but we are above average.

What is disturbing about our fuel poverty figures is that we have one of the highest levels of what they unfortunately call "excess winter deaths". About 2,800 predominantly old people are affected and research shows that there is a clear link between both. In all this conversation about charging, given how poorly the State has responded to the issue of fuel poverty and the fact that we know it costs lives, does the Public Water Forum have any confidence in the State's ability to deal with water poverty when the Government's own figures clearly tell us that they are not doing a good job in dealing with fuel poverty?