Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 28 May 2025
Committee on Infrastructure and National Development Plan Delivery
Uisce Éireann: Future Work Programme
2:00 am
Mr. Niall Gleeson:
Again, we go back to the fact we are compliance-driven. Basically, up to now, we have been working with the EPA on drinking water issues or wastewater. We have wastewater treatment plants that are polluting rivers. We are trying to fix all of those up. Regarding the vast majority of settlements that had raw sewage flowing into a sea or river, that has been sorted. We are about 90% done. We have six projects on the go this year. On the growth area, we do not have a mandate to go in and invest just for growth. If a town does not have an issue with its wastewater plant or drinking water plant, we do not tend to go into that town. We have been saying that if you want an accelerated housing programme, we need to have a mandate to go in. We have asked for the extra €2 billion to spend that money on growth projects. The challenge is we still have a lot of work to do on the environmental side. That will be at the expense of the EPA, which might say it would like that €2 billion to be spent on compliance projects because we have not finished everything. We are saying we will do some growth projects and not delay but do less compliance projects than what might be possible.
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