Mr. Jerry Grant:

I thank the Acting Chairman. I have circulated some slides and if it is okay, I will take approximately ten minutes to give the committee an overview of our perception of the scale of the challenge of compliance with the EU directive on urban wastewater treatment and the issues in respect of the case before the European Court of Justice and how we are going about dealing with the problem.

Slide three shows that we have more than 1,000 wastewater treatment plants across the country. Some 173 schemes cover areas with a population of 2,000 or more, which qualify under the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive 91/271 EEC. The 38 locations notified in the case represent a sample from the 173 schemes for more than 2,000 population. This is a significant decrease in the number of cases in recent years as investment has proceeded. This year we expect the number to decrease further, as the schemes have been upgraded in Clonakilty, Clifden and Carrigtouhill. Work on the Carrigaline scheme was recently commissioned and we propose that work will be commissioned on Youghal later this. There is a lot happening to schemes on this list. However, there are other schemes that will take longer.

I will set out the reasons that these schemes are non-compliant. The effluent standards in Ringsend in Dublin, which is clearly the most significant of all the schemes with almost 2 million population equivalent is an overloading problem in addition to phosphorous and nitrate levels.

There is no treatment whatsoever in Arklow, where there is discharge of raw sewage into the Avoca River. Work on that scheme has been significantly delayed over the years by the statutory process and court challenges. We have had to start from scratch again. A new site has been selected and that will go An Bord Pleanála later on this year. In Youghal, there is a problem with the bathing water as a result of the lack of treatment of sewage.

There are significant high quality receiving waters, such as the Broadmeadow Estuary, to which effluent from Swords is discharged. We need to have higher standards in those schemes.

All these issues are reflected in the European Court of Justice's argument that has been put forward along with overflows from the networks, which are a much larger problem in the long term for this country to tackle.

In the next slide we set out a number of things we are doing to combat the problem. Irish Water is investing very substantial amounts in new plants and upgrading existing plants. We are also putting a lot of effort into optimising existing plants, improving operations and doing small scale investments that bring them into compliance. This is satisfactory in many cases. We are also looking at source control, because many of our plants are significantly affected by industrial, commercial and trade discharges which can overload the plant and cause it to fail. These three distinct work streams are contributing to solving the problem. Very often high profile incidents arise from emergency overflows and spills when pumps break down and so on. There is a great deal of work going into assessing critical assets from a risk point of view and trying to put in more secure storage and so on, so that it does not lead to fish kills. Members will have noticed that fish kills often featured in prosecutions.

Slide five will give members some sense of the scale of what is being done in the short term. Given the scale of the wastewater challenge, it is important that in the first full investment cycle by Irish Water from 2017-2021 to prioritise in particular the ECJ cases and also those 44 plants with no treatment facilities. Under our minor upgrades programme we will spend €320 million and the one off larger plants will cost more than €1.2 billion, which is more €1.55 billion in the period. We would expect to be very close to completion of all works on those 38 sites by that date. That is something we will be conveying through the Department to the European Commission. Equally, we think we will get the vast majority of those untreated sites dealt with in that period.

The ongoing European Court of Justice case is quite complex because there are three drivers of non-compliance. There were in some cases data issues as the European Union Commission was not satisfied that it had the necessary evidence to show that there was compliance. There are some situations where we may be able to get schemes addressed through more evidence of the quality of treatment and the receiving water. Cork city is an example where we believe there is evidence that it may not be necessary, for example, to spend a significant amount of money taking out nitrogen and phosphorous. We must provide that evidence to the EPA in the context of a licence review and that would allow that issue to be dealt with, if that evidence is accepted. It is important that when we spend money, we spend it on the back of solid evidence that it will produce an environment dividend and not simply because there is misinformation or misunderstanding.

As I said, on the area of networks there is a long-term challenge because many of our urban networks leak in and out and spill when it rains. The spills in places such as Athlone, Thurles and Roscrea are the cause of the breaches that we have to address. They are very complex to deal with because one has to go back and survey the networks to find out the information. It can be quite difficult to come up with solutions. There is a problem with the overloaded plants and the plants that were never designed in the first place to meet the standards.

Slide eight shows the distribution of all plants across the country and the places indicated with a brown dot are the treatment plants in this category. In slide nine, one can see the locations that are impacted by the network issues, the basic treatment issues or the nutrient issues. One can see that some of the locations are marked with little green dots, and that is to signify that we think we have done the work there but we have to produce the evidence, the commissioning reports and so on to demonstrate that they are complying.

In slide ten, we have set out that we have spent €179 million on wastewater treatment in the years 2014 to 2016. That will be significantly ramped up in the remaining period. It is fair to say that we invested more money into drinking water in the early years. There was also a factor that these major capital wastewater schemes take a great deal of time to bring through the planning process. Arklow is a very good example of this. When one has to go back to square one, the first thing is that one has to go through a very elaborate site selection process because at the end of the day, one's application will not succeed in An Bord Pleanála unless one has gone through a very rigorous and transparent process around the picking of the site, the environmental studies and so on. One is talking about a very significant lead in time, if there are no plans ready to go to site. That is reflected in the fact that the balance will tilt back to wastewater treatment in the next number of years. At the bottom of the slide one will see a visual representation that we expect to be very close to a full resolution of these issues by 2021. One can also see the sequence over the period since 2012, when this issue first came to light as a pilot case. It has moved on in Europe to a reasoned opinion and it looks like that it will go to the European Court of Justice pretty quickly. We would expect we will be given a period of time by the court to fix the problem. Obviously, the challenge is to ensure that we comply and deliver on the plan within that period of time.

The four remaining slides illustrate what is going on. In the case of the Ringsend wastewater treatment plant upgrade project Irish Water will have to spend approximately €360 million to completely refurbish the Ringsend plant to bring the capacity from 1.6 million population equivalent up to 2.4 population equivalent and to meet the nitrogen and phosphorous standards. It is a really massive project within an existing site. The State has already invested €250 million in that site. In the Ringsend plant, we are using a new technology that we identified in Holland, which has been proven on the site in pilot studies and that has saved us about €150 million because we intend to go to An Bord Pleanála to omit a major tunnel that was intended to be put in beneath the bay. I hope that scheme will be fully approved and we will get it fully delivered. We are at the tender stage for a major part of the scheme, which will bring the basic treatment capacity up to 2.4 million population equivalent for €160 million.

The Cork Lower Harbour was an area that had been neglected to a large extent. The Cork Lower Harbour towns all discharged relatively untreated sewage into the lower harbour. The wastewater treatment scheme is being delivered at a cost of €117 million. The first phase has addressed Crosshaven and Carrigaline and the treatment plant is working. We are now on-site to collect in Passage West, Monkstown and Ringaskiddy. It is a very complex sewerage network project. The last leg will be to bring the waste from Cobh across the estuary and into the treatment plant. It will probably be 2020 by the time that scheme will be fully completed.

Ultimately, we will invest €52 million in the Arklow sewerage scheme, because it needs a whole network to collect from the various outfalls to the Avoca River and it needs a substantial new treatment plant.

Irish Water inherited Gweedore as a problem to be addressed in terms of urban wastewater, but it is in fact a very densely populated rural area, with 600 to 700 houses. A traditional scheme would cost in the region of €35 million to €50 million, which is clearly unaffordable and would be very difficult to operate. In that case we have come up with an option based on what we have seen in Denmark and New Zealand, which involves putting small pump systems on every septic tank and having small bore pipelines to connect the system up to a treatment plant. We are doing a pilot project in Gweedore in the next five or six months. We have been talking to the local community and getting very good support for the scheme. That demonstrates that in some cases, it needs quite novel and innovative solutions in order to come up with cost effective ways of addressing these problems.

To summarise, Irish Water is committed to delivering on the plans we have set out to the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, and to the Commission on Energy Regulation, CER, for the resolution of all these cases together with all the other issues involved. We make the point that there are significant other issues out there, in particular in the networks, that will come to light over time and will have to be address in future cycles of investment.

The plans are in place. There are always issues and risks around statutory process, we intend to deliver that programme. I thank the Acting Chairman and members.