Mr. Mike Quinn:

On the issue of engagement with the public, I totally respect rural communities. In my past role in Bord na Móna I operated in the midlands. I, therefore, totally understand the issue. We have a schools and communities programme and have appointed regional communications officers. They go around to schools as part of our green schools programme. I am well aware of the excellent An Taisce programme and that is our intent as well.

We plan in the next six to eight weeks to launch five metrics on which Irish Water's success will be based and we will publish those every six months. Those five metrics include drinking water quality, as measured by the EPA, and it will be based on the 44 locations where raw sewage was pumped into the lakes, rivers and sea and our progress towards eliminating that by 2021. We will also publish the current and prior six month leakage rates by county in order to show the improvement we have made in each of those local authorities. We will speak about our capital delivery programme, which is ramping up significantly over the next number of years, as well as headroom around the country. We will publish the headroom for every county, on a county by county basis, in support of economic development. Those five metrics will be published every six months and we will be publishing the plan with targets over the next five years. That should aid the public in understanding where Irish Water is progressing.

I do not think that we have done a good job engaging with the public on the challenges facing Irish Water. For information, we ran a survey in the fourth quarter of last year which showed that 72% of people in Dublin believe the water services are either good or excellent. There is a complete lack of knowledge around the state of the infrastructure that provides those services. We have a job of work to do this year, which I will be leading, to ensure that the reason we are spending the amount of money we are spending to improve the water infrastructure is understood by the public.

We recognise that a lot of interest in the water supply project has come to the surface over the past number of months. We will be holding an open day for elected representatives next month to take everyone through the project at a detailed level so that they are up to speed on exactly where the project is at and our plans out to 2025.