Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy has answered his own question in a way. The main issue we have is planning-related. These are major schemes so when we anticipate, as we do, we plan on the basis of a forecast that things will move along smoothly and, naturally enough, we will build into our capital plan a sufficient amount to allow for that. For instance, the profile for 2019 to 2021 combined Crossmolina, Glashaboy, Enniscorthy and the River Poddle. When the four of them are put together, there is a combined underspend coming in of approximately €75 million. All of those schemes are at different stages. We could get into each one individually to see where they are or, more important, where they are not.

We have to build into our profile each year a sufficient money for each one of them to be able to proceed because we do not know what is out there on the horizon, or what rock one of them will hit, during the planning process. We have to build a sufficient amount of capital into our profile to allow them to move on. We hope and anticipate that they will move smoothly. Unfortunately, some of them are fairly big in scale, such as Enniscorthy, a town with a population upwards of 10,000 people. These are not small schemes but major ones. We are carrying over capital for fairly substantial population bases. We do not want to carry over that capital, but we are doing so due to factors outside our control, primarily judicial review. As I said to the Deputy's party colleague earlier, I hope that as part of the upcoming legislative review in this context we will get to a situation where we will not have towns throughout the country that are waiting more than 20 years for flood relief schemes.