Dr. Michelle Minihan:

If I might begin by addressing the Deputy's question about the follow-up on the March audit, the EPA did follow up on the audit. We received a response from Irish Water on 3 May which set out the actions it had taken to address each of the recommendations in our March audit report. As part of that, we are continuously tracking Irish Water's implementation of our audit recommendations via an open investigation file, which an inspector continuously monitors. In that response, Irish Water committed to completing certain works by specified dates. We tracked the progress of those works and we have been concerned with slippage identified by Irish Water. For example, in the response of 3 May to the March audit, the filters were due to be upgraded by quarter 4 of 2019, the end of this year. That has now slipped to quarter 2 of 2020. We have continued to monitor and engage with Irish Water to address that slippage and engage continuously to see what the problems are around it.

If I could come back to the Deputy's question about how there seems to be a difference between the October event and that of yesterday, he is correct. October's event was a blockage in a chemical dosing line which meant the water was not being treated correctly for a period. There was also a period in which alarms were activated and not responded to. I think the Deputy's question related to whether, if our audit recommendations from March had been put in place, the October event could have been avoided. Our October audit report clearly called out that if the automatic shut-down had been put in place across the entire plant as was recommended in the March audit report, we believe the incident itself would have been avoided in October. That action, the automatic shut-down of the plant, is the fail-safe which ensures that whatever happens, if an alarm is not responded to the plant is shut down and cannot produce water that is possibly unsafe or contaminated.