Mr. Sean Laffey:

For every man, woman and child in the country there is 12.5 m of network pipe water main. That is twice Germany's network per head of population. We have 65,000 km of water mains. This is because of the nature of our country, being very rural, and because our networks were managed over the years by 34 separate local authorities which invested in networks in every single small town or village.