Mr. Jerry Grant:

I will try to make sure I capture the various points that were raised, starting with those of Deputy Ó Broin. He raised the number of sites defined by the EPA as priority sites. This is the bigger canvas we must address. All these sites are within the work programme. Not all of them will be delivered in this period but much other work will be delivered along with the 38 ECJ cases. For every one of those projects, we now have a plan and a programme, but some of them extend quite some time. I acknowledge what David Flynn said, that some of them have been delayed in the programme information to the EPA because when we inherited all of these projects, many of them had to be rescoped, many had to go through statutory process, and what we have tried to do is put realistic and deliverable dates on them. There are plenty of trips and falls along the way that can happen and we try to notify the EPA of any of these - for example, statutory or court objections - so that we keep the dates realistic. I think we are getting better at that. We probably were not very good at it to begin with. Some of these sites are being tackled. Mr. Flynn also mentioned, very fairly, that there are plants that fail for operational reasons, and we are working our way through those cases. We send in a process team, we have a minor capital programme that goes in behind it and we have brought a number of plants into compliance. Shannon town is not necessarily compliant but it has improved significantly through controlling industrial discharges and upgrading the plant, and we have much more work to do there. Birr needed a big upgrade. We have been able to get it compliant again by examining the discharge coming in and carrying out a €600,000 or €700,000 upgrade of the plant, so there is much happening at that level as well.

Deputy Ó Broin talked about data. This is very interesting because many of these schemes did not have working flow measurement or sampling equipment, which is the prerequisite for data. One of our current programmes is to retrofit across our plants flow measurement and sampling equipment and then to collect data. Of course, a decent interval of data is needed. One needs a 12-month period of data to have any meaningful information. This is all in hand and we are improving and investing in the information systems that will track all this information. We are modelling this on the EPA's systems so that we can become better at communicating in a systematic way in delivering data.

Deputy Ó Broin asked the very interesting question what we need to do if we bring the Shannon pipeline to Dublin and so on if we have more capacity. It is a much bigger question, but to deal very quickly with it, we will need to spend, between water and sewerage for the greater Dublin area, about €2.5 billion in order to secure the region for the long term - say, the 20-year horizon. On the wastewater side, the priority in the very short term is to increase Ringsend's capacity by 50%, or from 1.6 million population equivalent to 2.4 million, and make it compliant at the same time with the higher standards. However, that is not enough. We also must increase the capacity of a number of sewers. For example, the Blanchardstown sewer must be duplicated - a very big scheme of almost €50 million - so that we can get the sewage into Ringsend. At the same time, the committee may be aware that we are planning a later scheme to follow, hopefully to be in place by the mid-2020s, namely, the greater Dublin drainage project. This involves a new treatment plant in north County Dublin, at Clonshaugh, and an outfall to the Irish Sea. This scheme will probably go to An Bord Pleanála in 2018. It is another very significant investment and is designed to pick up from the situation whereby Ringsend will be limited to as much as it can deal with in the long term. There are medium-term and longer-term plans and they must all fall into line in a proper sequence.

The big improvement in the latter end of the current investment plan largely arises from the fact that many of the schemes had to go through both rescoping and redefinition and then planning. Arklow is one example where we had to go back to square one, but many of these schemes had to be rescoped and then taken through the tender process so that many of them will be on site. This is why the wastewater spend in particular will rise significantly in the immediate years to come, from 2018 into 2019 and 2020.

There will be a significant bulge at that point.

Picking up on Senator Boyhan's questions about the deficit, the point here is that we are only talking today about a subset of a much bigger problem because when we did the water services strategic plan, WSSP, we estimated the total deficit across the infrastructure, water and wastewater, to be approximately €13 billion. We will review that as we do reviews of WSSP every five years and that will take account of the river basin management plans, which will undoubtedly drive further investment needs.

Senator Boyhan referred to the Ringsend plant and the scale of the work required. That plant is currently trying to manage an overload of approximately 25%, which obviously puts pressure on it. We have spent approximately €50 million on this already and we have made significant improvements in the process, which are helping. The next stage of expansion will be to build the new capacity. That will get us into a much better position from the point of view of capacity and will also get us very close to compliance, but we will then have a number of years of retrofit work in the older part of the plant to fully complete the job. We hope to be compliant before that, but we need to complete all the work so that we have a sustainable scheme. I referred to the greater Dublin drainage to follow. Ringsend cannot be the long-term enduring solution for Dublin, growing as it is expected to grow, and therefore the further greater Dublin drainage scheme is an important part of the longer term infrastructure.

The Senator referred to Shanganagh, but Shanganagh as a wastewater treatment plant is very comfortable on capacity. It has a lot of spare capacity to deal with the whole Carrickmines area and I am very comfortable with both the performance and the capacity of that plant . The Senator also mentioned Merrion Strand. This really illustrates how complex these issues are, because there is no evidence that the Ringsend discharge is actually having any impact on beaches in Dublin Bay. In fact, Dollymount is safe. What is hurting Merrion Strand and many other places - I notice Clifden, for example, failed today even though there is a new treatment plant - is the fact that there are storm water discharges that are pollutives. For example, the Elm Park stream, which comes into the sea there, is picking up an awful lot of pollution which is then discharged on to the strand when it rains. That is what is causing the problem. When one starts digging into that, of course, it is a much bigger, longer term problem.

With regard to funding, we have set out a business plan up to 2021 and we have Government support for that. The money has been committed and I expect that it will come through because the commitment has been given. We are working on the basis that money will be available. People sometimes ask if one had an extra billion or two if one could spend it next year or the year after. The reality is that we should really should have three or four years sight of additional funding, and it will be critically important that in the next cycle, beyond 2021, that the necessary level of funding is committed. It really is down to sustained funding. That is crucial. There may be other one-off costs, like the Shannon pipeline, for example, which would come in as a significant one-off generational investment that may have to be specifically dealt with.

We engage on a continuous basis with the Department but it expects us to deliver the programme. There is a clarity now about the way these projects are carried out that is a big improvement on what it was, because we have the responsibility to deliver the work, our regulators have oversight of us and the Department's job is to provide the policy. However, the Department also, of course, provides the interface with the European Commission. We simply provide information to the Department and it, in turn, provides it to the Commission, so there is continuing engagement. The Department asks us to account for how we are performing on the various programmes because it does not want give false information to the Commission either.

To address Senator Grace O'Sullivan's questions, which are linked to those, I can give the Senator no indication of the timelines of the judgment or, indeed, of fines. I have no information on that at all. What I can say is that I believe that the Commission has to be convinced that we have credible plans. It has to see evidence that we are delivering on those plans within the timeframes that we say. When this matter goes to court and the court makes a decision, it will be critical at that point that we can show the court that we have a plan and that we will look for a period of time. The courts in general are reasonable if they consider the plans coherent and fully-funded, and that they are being delivered. That is as much as I can say on that.

Senator Grace O'Sullivan referred to various compliance targets in the WSSP and compared them with what we outlined today in respect of this particular case. We are relating there to the broader compliance challenge across all of these sites. This has to do with the river basin management plans and more particularly to the licences we have been given for all the plans, which are consistent, not with the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, necessarily, but with the broader range of requirements from the river basin plans. One can have all the numbers in the world talking about this, but sometimes one is comparing apples and oranges.

I have covered the question of funds. The joint committee has obviously done its work on that, and there should hopefully be a lot of security there for citizens. There is a basis there for committing funds. This is really a question of consistent funding at the right levels over the long term, which is really three or four investment cycles.