Ms Fiona Quinn:

I am afraid I will not be able to give detailed answers to the Deputy's questions in some areas, but we can provide that information to her separately. On the Rebuilding Ireland home loan and difficulties accessing it, I will have to get my colleagues on that side of things to follow up on with the Deputy.

There is a major Government agenda in the area of digitisation. The interesting thing is that with all the challenges Covid-19 might have caused across the State, one of the potential benefits has been the acceleration of activity in digitisation. We have seen that ourselves. Almost overnight, we managed to move the majority of our staff off site and seamlessly continued to provide services. It is an area on which we will see a huge focus, and there is a commitment to that in the strategy statement.

I will link that aspect in with the Deputy's question on the electoral register because that is a key project we will see coming up. Regarding our engagement with the committee, the programme for Government commits to several reforms in the area of electoral policy, including the establishment of an electoral commission and the modernisation of the electoral registration process. Those are two issues we are progressing well. It happens to be my area of responsibility as well, so I know the detail. We expect in early December to provide the committee with a general scheme of a Bill to effect and implement some changes in this area. We look forward to detailed engagement with the committee on the initiative. One of the parts of the electoral registration modernisation programme is that it is much bigger than just the online reform aspect; there will also be an optional online element to the project. It will be very much about learning from the experience of the Dublin local authorities and their use of . We have engaged with those authorities to try to learn from that experience. We hope we will be able to build on that and roll out that capability across the country. It is a big IT project, as the Deputies can imagine. I do not want to waste too much time on this topic today because we will be in to talk to the committee about this in detail before too long, hopefully. A roll-out of an IT project of that nature will take some time, but it is certainly in our sights.

Turning to the role of the Department in the area of water provision, again I will get some of my colleagues to respond to the Deputy in more detail. The Department, however, has a role that is similar to the role it has with the rest of our agencies and local authorities. I refer to setting policies and supporting, engaging and overseeing activity in our areas of responsibilities.