Mr. Mark Griffin:

As mentioned by the Deputy we have moved to a different situation to when we started dealing with this particular issue on foot of the European Court of Justice ruling. We have moved from 126 landfills to 43, have remediated 46 sites and have spent €170 million on that activity. As rightly pointed out by the Comptroller and Auditor General in the chapter presented this morning, there is a great deal more work to be done. Looking at where we were when the Comptroller and Auditor General issued his report, which I think was September 2020, 21 final certificates of authorisation have issued from the Environmental Protection Agency, which is a further eight, four draft certificates of authorisation decisions are due in 2021, 24 certificates of authorisation applications are pending final decision and a further 20 are expected to be submitted in the coming months. Progress is being made, but there is a great deal of work to do to address that outstanding issue. The other important bit is the work identified by the Comptroller and Auditor General as needing to be done, including risk assessments to be undertaken and certificates of authorisation to be prepared by the EPA. We have put in place a procurement framework, valued at €7 million over a three to four-year period. This will allow local authorities to draw down from the framework and to point to the sites in their areas in respect of which, based on the section 22 register, they have concerns. They can then do the risk assessment, identify the nature of the risk as being low, medium or high and identify the nature of the works, if any, to remediate so that we can constantly over the next few years move through the process, park the ones that do not represent a risk and focus the resources of the State on remediation of the balance of those that are still causing a problem from an environmental perspective.