Mr. Dara Lynott:

The driver for the licensing of wastewater treatment plants was the fact that Ireland lost a case in the European Court of Justice for implementation of the dangerous substances directives. Under the waste control of dangerous substances going into the environment, discharges must be licensed. Part of the negotiation to close out that case, which is closed out, was putting into force legislation that would provide for the licensing of more than 1,000 wastewater treatment plants. The timeframe that was set by the Commission was to have everything licensed by the end of 2015. A precondition of that was that the smallest discharges should be licensed first.

The statistics are presented on page 5 of our submission. To date we have issued 70 licences and 520 of certificates of authorisations, which are for the smallest ones. A further 162 remain to be licensed, which we anticipate licensing by the end of next year. The lack of resources has been an issue in the past four or five years but in the past year we got sanction from the Department for a number of temporary staff to ensure we meet that target of licensing everything by the end of 2015.

Is there any reason those 162 are left? No, there is not. We prioritised, for example, the 42 discharges that are untreated and they are all licensed. We targeted all the discharges that were near shellfish, for example, on the Mayo coast. We looked at the impact on the shellfish grounds. We worked with the Marine Institute on that. We require within our licences that the shellfish should be tested for viruses to determine if there is any connection between the discharge and the shellfish grounds. If there is, we have a requirement with our licences to put in ultraviolet treatment that would knock out anything that might infect the shellfish.

Historically, certain discharges go into groundwater or near special areas of conservation. These are not new things. The agency was given in one fell swoop under legislation 1,000 facilities to license in 2007 and we are working through those. The habitats directive requires that an appropriate assessment be done for each of those discharges that is next to or near a special area of conservation. A particular priority for us was rivers that have margaritifera, mussels that need to be protected under European law.

Irish Water has to provide us with the information. All the licences transferred from local authorities to Irish Water on 1 January. We are working Irish Water to give us the information when we need it in order that we can license in the most efficient way possible.

The appropriate assessments are still being carried out for some of those facilities but we have worked out a scheme with Irish Water to get the information at set periods of time.