Mr. Jerry Grant:

I will revisit the issue of co-ordination. There was also a question around access to meters and meter data. I think that is a very important point and one that would be very helpful. With regard to the question about pipes and stopcocks, when I spoke earlier about the direct Irish Water staff supervising developments, that is for developers. That is for all developer connections. We are relying on local authorities for local connections but the specifications are the same. Those specifications involve an appropriate depth, which is 2 ft. of cover - 0.6 m - to prevent frost heave action.

If we look at any town in Ireland, we have the old cast iron in the centre. I received a lot of representations in Clonmel because not only is cast iron a problem from the problem of leakage, it is a problem from the point of view of corrosion in the pipes so every time there is a loss of supply, we get that coloured water problem, which is due to the disturbance of sediments. There is a massive issue nationally.

The priority in terms of replacement has to be those pipes that fail regularly and destroy service. Asbestos cement is probably top of the list nationally in terms of that along with some of the very poor quality PVC that went in during the 1970s. The very old smaller diameter cast iron tends to be a problem while the larger cast iron generally tends to be in very good structural condition and is also a bit easier to find leaks on because there is more of a noise impact that the correlators can pick up.

Design, build, operate, DBO, contracts across the country are preforming very well. I would prefer if we could take them back into direct control but until such time as we build the capability within the utility, we cannot do that. By and large, they are working very well. We have a team that supervises the DBOs. There are penalty mechanisms if they do not perform and pick up on problems. The maintenance regime is built into the contracts and that maintenance is tracked and we only pay for it when it is seen to be implemented.

The issue in Fethard is the kind of thing that is very hard to prevent. The kerosene leak was obviously something that should never have happened. The question of it happening should not arise but it did. If something like that happened in any of our plans, for example, if a tanker turned over on the M4 and its contents got into the Liffey at Leixlip, it would be very difficult to pick that up before it got into the treatment system. In the case of Fethard, the attendant went to the site, got the smell of it in the tanks and checked the concentrate in the reservoir where there seemed to be a small trace of it. By and large from all the testing we have done since, it does not appear to have got into the pipes to any appreciable extent.

It is terribly important that people understand that the HSE did not lift the restriction until it was certain that the water was safe. I want to say that to reassure the people of Fethard because the Deputy is right about the plant. It is a pristine plant and it was a shame that it was destroyed by the kerosene. We went to enormous trouble and spent an awful lot of money to recover the plant so that it is perfect but it is very important that people are reassured. We carried out a huge amount of testing for hydrocarbon concentrations and the HSE was totally satisfied. It does not lift restrictions unless it is 100% sure.

In the broader sense, I am satisfied that DBO contracts are very well supervised but I would say that when something like that happens in a river system, it is very hard to detect it at least before it gets into the plant. We can pick it up in the plant and the standard monitoring systems we have automatically pick up things like the chlorine residual and there are other parameters we pick up automatically. We should probably look across our plants to see if there is any other monitoring we can put at the inlet that would give us early detection of these things for call out because that is probably the best option. We will certainly look into that and see if there is more work we can do there.

Nuclear would fall into that category in the sense that if a nuclear accident happened somewhere, we might get some warning of it because it would not be in Ireland. We are looking to see whether we can pick up but at the end of the day, we could not stop the systems from being contaminated. There is no way we could stop the systems from being contaminated. Quite frankly, it is not the particular type of event we have considered in any detail.