Mr. Feargal Ó Coigligh:

The managing director has pointed to some of the difficulties with the operations. If one looks at the nine recommendations made in the most recent Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, audit report, five of them use the term “Irish Water and Fingal County Council should”. That can create a difficulty as in such situations one agency will ask if it was a direction for it or the other agency. There are issues with this control and responsibility.

The EPA will provide the Department with regular updates at a monthly meeting. We have quarterly output monitor group meetings which include us, Irish Water, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, NewERA and the EPA and at which we look at the overall outputs of Irish Water in terms of investment, leakage management, the urban wastewater treatment directives, challenges and the remedial action list. At the last meeting of the output monitoring group I was at, the issue of Tallanstown came up. It showed up as a spike as a significant boil water notice had arisen in the previous period. Individual audit reports are not addressed to the Department but to the operator. The March report was not particularly brought to our attention. We were not particularly aware of a significant issue in Leixlip, save that it was mentioned on the website. It was not addressed to the Department, stating we should be aware of it and that, therefore, we needed to talk to somebody about it. The seriousness of the incident meant that the Minister felt he needed to ask the EPA if there were other actions that needed to be taken or if there were policy impacts. The next time we meet we will have had the experience of dealing with this incident and it will need to be discussed because, as has been pointed out, it is completely out of scale with anything else we have experienced before.