Mr. Seán Laffey:

To touch on the lead issue, Irish Water launched and was approved for a lead strategy in 2015. We are working away on that. As Mr. O'Leary outlined, our lead strategy was predicated on a two part approach.

The first part was that we would look at using orthophosphate to reduce lead levels in properties to an acceptable standard. Then the long-term plan was that we would remove all lead. To reassure Deputy Casey, none of the Irish Water public network has any lead in it. All of the lead we are dealing with is on private property or in houses generally built before the 1970s. One of the main issues we have with reducing the lead standard to 5 mg per litre, which is an incredibly low standard of five millionths of a gram of lead per litre which is effectively zero, is that orthophosphate will not get one below that standard all the time so lead replacement is the only way to go. The other issue we are encountering is that modern brass fittings are between 5% and 7% lead and one will get the 5 mg per litre limit from the brass fittings even in new houses. We are talking about a limit which effectively means that one can have no components in one's water distribution system which have any type of lead in them.