Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

A lot of my earlier questions were answered in the subsequent round. I have two questions for SWAN and then I will follow up with the EPA on a few of them.

The European Commission published an opinion of non-compliant with the water framework last week. Maybe somebody from SWAN can talk us through their view of what that means and its significance to the discussion we are having here. To pick up Dr. Cotter's point around public participation, it could be that I am misreading the heads but my understanding is that there is no provision for public participation in the granting of a licence for an existing extractor. There is no provision for third party opinions and I would like the views of both SWAN and the EPA on that.

I have a more specific question for the EPA. Turning to this business of not being able to refuse an existing extractor, I know Dr. Cotter rightly said that conditions can be applied but what is the logic of simply having no provision to refuse an abstraction? It could be the case, for example, that there has been a change in the environmental circumstances and on going through the licensing process, the agency realises that there are things happening that were not happening before of which it was not aware. Surely there should be a provision to refuse existing abstractors if the nature of that abstraction is causing environmental difficulties for the water source and putting us in breach of the water framework directive.

Returning to the thresholds, I know we are spending a lot of time on this and they are not the only thing but they are kind of the central linchpin of this. A couple of times Dr. Cotter talked of a trade-off between getting to the greatest level of risk and a balance between the administrative and cost burdens. That is a dangerous way to look at this. I would have thought that the EPA would start in the first instance with considering what it would like to capture in an ideal world and then moving to considering what it can capture first, within the existing resources. It may be an unfair question which the agency cannot answer but if it were not constrained by the existing resources, or if it had a Minister who was saying: "Tell me what you need", would the agency still be recommending 25, 250 and 2,000 cu m.? If the agency had those greater resources would it not be looking at a different threshold?

On enforcement, I thank Dr. Cotter for her frankness. It is a very significant piece of information for us because when we raised these issues with the Department, its representatives were essentially saying that there is not an enforcement mechanism, that the heads do not make provision for this. Would it the EPA's view that it is the appropriate body to enforce and if so what would be the resourcing requirement on top of that?

I then have two quick questions. Will the register be public?

Does it make sense to grant an indefinite licence? Are there any other types of licences that the EPA currently grants that are indefinite?