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

It goes back to the earlier part of the meeting that we had with regard to Donegal. These are all important projects for the Office of Public Works. When CFRAM was identified initially, those with the greatest level of risk were put into the first tranche of the delivery programme. In conjunction with the advices that were given by the local authorities at the time, and having regard to regional balance, it is spread across the country to make sure that the maximum number could be delivered over the shortest period.

As I said previously to Deputies, we have had a number of different delays. Most of them have been in the area of planning, environment constraints and otherwise. These prevented us from making the progress that we would otherwise have liked to have made in the earlier part of the tranches, which is consuming both a huge amount of resources both in terms of local authorities and the Office of Public Works.

With regard to the other schemes in the second tranche, our staff in the Office of Public Works are engaging with the directors of services in each of the individual local authorities because we do resource engineers in individual local authorities, including Kilkenny. We do that to ascertain whether, were additional resources to be applied, it would be of benefit to the council in terms of doing some of the preliminary works around collecting the data that will be needed to present a planning application that is likely to succeed.

We are having that discussion with Kilkenny County Council at the moment.