Tony McCormack (Offaly, Fianna Fail)

I thank the witnesses for attending. I am the last person to ask questions today. Many of those I wanted to ask have already been asked, so I will try to go through the ones I have left. I hope I will not repeat questions that have been asked already.

Capacity issues were mentioned in terms of various towns and villages across the country. If we look at what is happening in my own county of Offaly at places like Burr and Banagher, there is not a huge amount of capacity left. In Edenderry, which is the second largest town in the county, we have no capacity there. I have been told it will be 2029 before we will be able to have anything there off-site. In Tullamore, approximately 2,000 houses are being built or in the pipeline and will be finished within the next 18 to 24 months, which will leave the town's capacity very tight. What is happening in terms of capacity in those areas? It is not just in Offaly; we have these issues right across the country. Is there a solution so that we will not come to a dead end where houses will not be able to be built? Is there a temporary fix that can be used or can a temporary wastewater facility be installed? Tullamore has a water treatment plant with a PE of 35,000, which is much more than the population of the town, but we do not have the physical pipe infrastructure to take the waste from one side of the town to the other. It was described to me that it will cost X to sort out the problem on the north side and X plus - we do not know - to sort out the problem on the south side. What is Uisce Éireann doing for towns and villages across the country that are suffering like this and is there a temporary fix that could be implemented to keep the building of housing going?