John Cummins (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will keep going on that point, if I may. In the past, local authorities would have taken a longer view. They would have said, in reference to a land bank that is zoned, that over the course of the next 15 to 20 years, 1,000 houses would built on it, for example. Over the course of ten years or two life cycles of a development plan, houses would be built and the levies on same would pay for the infrastructure that the council forward funded. The issue that Irish Water has with regard to forward funding is that it does not have the base that the ESB has, for example, in terms of being able to do that. We know the reasons for that but the points made by the industry are valid in terms of taking a view of that. I appreciate that Irish Water is restricted but if the utility was not constrained by the CRU model under which it operates, would an alternative model help in terms of bringing forward the likes of the developments that we are talking about? We are moving to ten-year development plans but at the moment, we are talking about two life-cycles of a development plan. Would Irish Water agree with the view taken by local authorities in the past, that essentially the development land will be developed out?