Mr. Ted O'Reilly:

With regard to servicing wastewater needs I will first address the national picture and then focus on the east Galway situation. There is the set-up of the small towns and villages growth programme which was referenced in the opening statement. That was set up in the past two years in recognition of the need to provide investment in smaller communities, primarily from a wastewater perspective. In recent years Irish Water has initiated and is progressing 50 projects that are addressing primarily wastewater and sump water needs. The level of expenditure on these projects once they are completed will be significant. We estimate it will be at least €300 million for those projects on their own. It is worth noting those 50 projects are part of a cohort of approximately 300 nationally where there is a need to increase the capacity in our wastewater treatment infrastructure to allow growth in rural areas.

From an east Galway perspective, as we applied the small towns programme to Galway in particular, two candidate sites came through that required investment. The Chair is probably aware of those two sites being Mountbellew and Ballygar. Both of those are progressing with projects under way.

In terms of the smaller settlements the Chair mentioned, they may fall under the infrastructure that does not currently reside within Uisce Éireann and we can check that after the fact and come back to him with more detail. For that type of infrastructure there are housing estates that would have been built a number of years previously and had stand-alone treatment plants provided by the developers at the time. They are known as developer-provided infrastructure. There is a process to follow to address these. That in itself represents a major problem nationally. There are approximately 540 of these particular types of estates throughout the country that have stand-alone wastewater treatment plants and they are in varying degrees of maintenance and operation. A number of them are causing quite a big problem, as the Chair referenced. Uisce Éireann is working very closely with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage on that. Currently, the responsibility in terms of taking these in charge lies with the planning authority and we are working with the Department to look at ways of resolving this. There is a very big path and investment need ahead of us to address all of these issues.