Ms Angela Ryan:

The small wastewater treatment plants have two aspects: the assets themselves and the consents required to put those assets in place. The consents are the planning consent and the environmental consent to discharge. As is often the case, it is the consenting process that takes longest. When thinking about developer-provided infrastructure, this has to be borne in mind. It is sometimes not the asset or its installation that presents the difficulty; rather, it is the process for getting consents to build and operate it and discharge effluent into the public domain. Uisce Éireann is examining this and working with Government agencies on it. Particularly with regard to smaller areas, we believe there could be simplification of the process. I am referring to general binding rules that might speed it up. I hope they will come through significantly.

With regard to the question about the water supply project, WSP, it is actually quite a simple one. It involves a wastewater treatment plant of the scale of water treatment plants we have in existence. It is about the size of the Ballymore Eustace water treatment plant. It entails a long main pipeline, amounting to 170 km, and pipes of 1.6 m in diameter, which is about up to my chin. We already have pipelines of that size throughout the country. It is actually relatively simple. The estimated construction period for the contract would be about 50 months. If we had the procurement completed at this stage and were ready to dig into the ground, with all the consents, it would take only about 50 months to deliver. Mention was made of Arklow wastewater treatment plant earlier in the session. It took three years and six months to build, but it was 26 years in development from when it was initially proposed. The focus has to be on enabling the infrastructure to be built in the first place. Again, it is a question of the common good. Often, there can be objections to the infrastructure. When it is built, it usually goes under the radar. The Arklow plant is an award-winning installation, so we request that people consider some of these elements in the process.