Mr. Mark Griffin:

Not on those 15 because it takes time. The committee will see others that are further progressed, on the second page, where they have moved beyond the tier 2 and tier 3 and now are in the process of having the certification of authorisation being assessed by the EPA. Once that is approved, one can move to works. The committee will see, in Table 2, a smaller number of sites where the certification of authorisation, COA, is under consideration by the EPA with remediation works programme for 2019. Then the committee will see, in Table 3, a number where the COA has issued and the works are planned or have commenced and then another suite of them, in Table 4, where works have been undertaken and a spend of €17.8 million made on them. That is the process.

We have a distance to go in terms of dealing with all of them. We are more comfortable than we would have been this time last year when I came before the committee because at that stage, we had not fully scoped out the tools that would be required to do that work. We have a resource now, in the EPA. We are just finalising the appointment of a resource in the three regional waste authorities which will be focused exclusively on dealing with this particular issue. We have trained up local authority staff. We have moved to a situation now where, of the €11 million budgeted in 2018 for landfill remediation, we will spend somewhere between €9.6 million and €10 million. It is good progress relative to 2017.

For the benefit of Deputy Connolly, one site which we spoke about last year was South Park. It had been classed as a high-risk site, category A, which, I think, caught the Deputy by surprise, but, in fact, the local authority has revisited that site, done a further assessment and is now seeking EPA approval to have that reclassified as a category C site - a low-risk site.