Ms Margaret Attridge:

We have had to build new head-count management systems and payroll systems to pay a large number of staff on a wide variety of terms and conditions.

With regard to IT systems, we have had to make sure that all the local authority officers or the operational centres now where people are based are linked into Irish Water systems and that everybody is provided with laptops and phones, and roll out new handheld units. There is a huge IT element to it.

Up until six months ago, we were operating on 31 different local authority safety management systems. We had to develop our own. First of all, we had to take them over and put them onto our systems and work to them and then we had to develop our own safety management system, roll that out and train everybody on that. There was a huge training element.

We have had to get all the local authority - over 2,000 people - staff training records and put them onto our system-----