Ms Maria O'Dwyer:

To deliver our capital investment plan, there are a number of legislative and statutory consents that we must achieve. They can range from planning permission via a local authority, planning as it relates to An Bord Pleanála and engaging with the EPA for wastewater discharge licenses. The Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has a new abstraction licensing regime in place. We also require licenses from the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, MARA, if we are doing work on the foreshore. We have land and wayleave consent. If land is required, we may have a CPO process. All of these can be subject to an environmental impact assessment and then each of them can be subject to a judicial review. Many of them are sequential and getting through them presents a challenge. We have had quite a lot of success in the work we have done. Over 200 water and wastewater treatment plants have been upgraded or newly built.

To answer the Deputy's question on how many years it would take, Uisce Éireann was formed over ten years ago. We knew about the multigenerational problem then in terms of the legacy situation our asset base is in. We have called out that we will probbaly need between €55 billion and €60 billion, out to 2050, as a minimum level of investment just to address the known issues in our water and wastewater asset base. It will take a number of decades to address all of the challenges.