Mr. Jerry Grant:

I note Senator Boyhan's point about the improved relationship. We continue to work on it. The lines for which Ms Collins is responsible are working better, but we will not be complacent and would welcome any feedback.

I am not clear about which investment in Galway city the Senator means. We have commenced the roll-out of a pipe replacement and water conservation project there. It is a city with a great deal of leakage and many issues with unquantified services and so on. It is also a difficult area in which to undertake pipe replacement work. Like many of our cities, it is unplanned and complicated and the traffic situation is terrible. That project is under way and will make a significant difference to water pressures and supplies in parts of the city.

Overall, we have a good water supply in Galway based on Lough Corrib, but we have considerable problems in west Galway. We intend to extend the scheme north and west of the city to remove much of the weak water supply in places like Carraroe, Tír na Fhia and so on that are vulnerable. That is part of our ongoing rationalisation of water services, particularly supplies. Some of that rationalisation will take a number of investment cycles, given that a great deal of money will be involved, but we will progress it piece by piece.

On Deputy Casey's questions, Ms Katherine Walshe will give details on standby generation and the availability of generators. One lesson we learned is that when one does not have generators on site, one has to wire in replacement ones. We are now putting in plug-in points which will save those three hours spent getting an electrician to a site and wiring in a generator. We did not appreciate the number of sites which did not have a point where one could plug in a generator.

There is a whole complex set of issues around the cold weather period. Many of the old cast-iron pipes and newer Wavin pipes put down by developers over the decades were laid too shallow. What is much more serious is the level at which service connections to houses are laid. Many of them have been laid only three or four inches deep and are guaranteed to freeze even in mild freezes. The service pipes are the single largest problem regarding long-term vulnerability of the system to cold weather. In rural areas, we were 20% up on normal demand during the freeze and 10% in urban areas. In rural areas, much of it was to do with taps to troughs in fields running flat out which had frozen. Many of these were picked up on the Monday or the Tuesday when people got back out and we then saw a significant drop. In the city, it was much more to do with service pipes running in old premises which were not being maintained or visited over the period, as well as the service connections themselves. There were also problems with leaks with the old cast-iron pipes.

Pipe replacement can only be done at a certain rate. One does pipe replacement where there are repeat bursts on a regular basis. We are replacing pipes which burst three or four times a month. We have 800 km completed so far and we have 1,000 km to do. A significant amount of that is in the greater Dublin area. It is not based around individual leaks but multiple frequent failures of pipes which, in turn, impact on communities.

There is no quick-fix to the service connection issue. We cannot go back. We must have much better building control and how properties are handed over to householders. It has been quite shocking so far.

The broader question of climate change is serious. We have seen more events such as high-intensity rainfalls causing flooding in urban areas. There is a trend towards drier summers in Dublin, although members might not think so in the recent past. That will impact on the availability of water locally. At the other extreme, the fact we have more intense floods means one has to balance the storage reservoirs like in Poulaphouca. We cannot allow it go too high because we have to ensure that if there is a major flood that it does not overtop the dam and cause a massive crisis. Climate change has to be factored into all our long-term plans. It has significant cost implications in how we climate-proof our services.