Ms Margaret Attridge:

We have a drought preparedness team that would constantly look at demand trends versus weather events in order to prepare for what will happen in the summer months. We have already stood up this year. We have plans in place in respect of communications and water conservation messaging that we go live on each year in critical areas. We have capacity to mobilise additional crews and use our meeting green data to target extra efforts when it comes to leakage. We have extensive plans that are set out in stages whereby we can pressure manage the network to reduce pressures by night to conserve water to allow reservoirs to fill up during the day. We have, therefore, detailed action plans to manage a dry weather event in the Dublin area. The other extreme weather events, such as cold weather events, tend to be more short-lived and are easier to manage. Our national water resource plan and our resilience planning very much feed into building out the robustness, strength and resilience of our assets.

I will give the Senator a few examples nationwide of the difference in our future planning implementation and upgrading of our schemes. Normally at this time of year we would be moving towards imposing night-time restrictions in areas like Clonakilty in County Cork. We have now linked Clonakilty to Bandon, so we do not envisage there will be night-time restrictions in Clonakilty this year. Similarly, outside of Limerick, Croom would normally be moving into night-time restrictions at this time of year. It is linked into Limerick's Clareville supply. This is the kind of work we are carrying out right across the country to improve the resilience of our schemes so they are not impacted by these dry weather events.