Mr. Jerry Grant:

In terms of the detailed planning that underpins the figures, in the past there have been four major public consultations and many different reports have been issued. We have endeavoured to clarify and, indeed, refine from time to time the basis of demand and the basis of our plans, with a view to providing maximum clarity as we prepare to submit this project for planning permission. This also takes advantage of additional data that was available from the feedback and, of course, the planning policy - for example, the national planning framework - as well as census 2016, which underpins the population data in the catchment.

In regard to leakage, when we compute the domestic demand and the non-domestic demand to the most accurate figures available, we estimate that the network system across the greater Dublin area suffers a typical daily leakage of 207 million l, which is 36% of the water provided. That compares with about 45% or 46% nationally. We have much higher percentage leakages in places like Cork city, parts of County Cork, Roscommon and so on. In the past several years we have been doing a lot of work to get our 750 district meter areas, DMAs, up to scratch. That includes getting them recommissioned, because many of them had fallen in to disrepair, as well as renewing the meters, tying them into the national telemetry system and so on. As members will know, we have installed about 58% of domestic meters nationally, although in the greater Dublin area that figure is a little lower, at about 45%, taking account of apartments and other constraints. We have installed a good deal of pressure management, probably nearly to the maximum limit. Clearly there is a point where pressure control begins to impact on basic customer service, especially in a city with apartment buildings and tall three-storey buildings. Pressure management has given us some dividend. Our local authorities have been endeavouring to carry out find-and-fix repairs across the system as much as they possibly can.

We are now about to launch a programme of work which we call our active leakage control programme. It will run for the next five years up to 2021, and will then be renewed in each successive period thereafter. This mirrors the best practice approach that has been used right across the United Kingdom, including England, Wales, Scotland and indeed Northern Ireland, to produce leakage figures that are somewhat lower, but which also reflect the difficulty and the period over which those systems have evolved. Those systems are largely comparable to ours. They are a mixture of cast iron from the Victorian era, polyvinyl chloride, PVC, asbestos and more recently medium-density polyethylene, MDPE. The age characteristics and the water characteristics, which give rise to the corrosiveness of metal pipes, are somewhat similar.

The map on the ninth slide shows the typical layout of pipes in unplanned city streets with a multiplicity of services. That is the reality of what we are dealing with. The replacement of pipes across 9,000 km of network has to be very carefully targeted and planned. Replacement of many of these pipes would be subject to constraints arising from working hours, during which access to business and delivery of goods would have to be managed. Moreover, work could not take place for the whole of December because of shopping in the lead-up to Christmas, and so on. There are many constraints, not to mention traffic and the impact on communities. Underlying that is the impact on water users, who would be out of service for long periods. We have 650,000 individual connections that we are aware of, and we know from the work we are doing in Galway, Dublin and elsewhere that we will only find out about at least 10% of the connections when we go about the work. It is an immensely complicated job of work. There are leakages in the bulk system, the transmission and the reservoirs. There are also leaks and bursts within the pipe network. A significant amount of leakage is what I call background seepage, that is, seepage at joints, much of which will never be found, economically or technically.

The tenth slide shows a typical excavation in the city streets. This is largely what we have to deal with. A multiplicity of services overlay each other in an unplanned way. We cannot replace pipes without interfering with the communications infrastructure, the gas infrastructure and indeed with the sewer connections, all of which crisscross each other, as we saw during the Luas project. It is important to understand that for us, as in Britain, recovery of leakage through pipe replacement is at least ten times as costly as recovery of leakage through find-and-fix. The technical and economic cases for pipe replacement are based on regular failure and customer service. The case for leakage control is based on finding and fixing the leaks while trying to stay ahead of the rate at which new leaks are forming. We have looked at London, which has been referenced. It took 14 years of sustained investment to get London's leakage rate down from 946 million l to 760 million l. The city's leakage programme replaced 260 km out of 19,000 km. The highest replacement rate they ever achieved in one year was 1.3%. Thames Water has pulled back from that approach, because the firm discovered that it was getting very poor value for mains replacement. It hit 80% of the leakage target that it expected to meet through the mains replacement programme, at enormous cost. London is now reverting to a strategy based on rolling out more domestic metering, beefing up district meters and going back to the hard grind of find-and-fix, with pipe replacement following, as I have said, for those pipes that are in difficulty.

The graph on the twelfth slide shows the effect of winter year in, year out. This shows that there is a continuing battle to deal with new leaks. For example, Storm Emma has put at least 15 million l a day of additional leakage into our system, which we now have to recover. That sort of thing will happen every year. Something will happen every year that causes additional leakages, not to mention the day-to-day increase in leakage in the system. All of that has to be dealt with before leakage can be driven down. There is absolutely no point in addressing this with a short burst of activity and expecting that to do some good, because it will not. Any gains will be lost in no time.

The next slide shows the component parts to our leakage management system. I will not go into huge detail, but obviously information is the first requirement. For planning purposes, we use good data on the network that comes from the system and a leakage management system that will predict leakage in every DMA across the country on a daily and weekly basis when we commission it in the next couple of months. It is critically important that the district meter areas are working. They are used for step-testing, district testing and water balancing on a local level. As well as the domestic meters, the renewal of the non-domestic meters which we are currently rolling out will greatly improve the accuracy of our measurement of non-domestic usage. Then there is the find-and-fix programme. As I said, in the greater Dublin area that would require something like 6,000, 7,000 or even 8,000 individual holes to be dug in a year. On top of that, we are replacing 20 to 30 km of pipe at the moment. That will increase as we identify the pipe that should be relaced as a matter of priority. We can be absolutely certain that a replacement rate of 1% would be the maximum we could achieve without bringing the city to a standstill.

The graph on the fourteenth slide shows the journey to bring leakage down over the next number of years from the current daily figure of about 207 million l to a figure of 140 million l as a target for 2051. That will involve fixing a volume of leakage three or four times the amount of the ultimate reduction, because of the continually rising leakage pressure in the network. Taking these considerations together, the fifteenth shows a profile of the situation that is facing the greater Dublin area between now and 2025. If growth in water demand is contained to 2%, we will survive until 2025 without the water supply project, WSP, but without any contingency for emergencies of the kind we have had. That means we will still have the same problem with weather events, whether it is a drought or a freeze. If our growth in water demand exceeds 2% in period, we will run out of water sooner. That is the bottom line. Over the past four years, underlying growth in water demand in the greater Dublin area was 1.9%. That is how tight the situation is at present.

The sixteenth slide shows the benefitting corridor within the eastern and midlands region. This area has compelling demand shortages at the moment. That includes the Mullingar regional scheme which covers a huge area of county Westmeath apart from Mullingar town. We face major problems in extending the greater Dublin area supply to Ashbourne and Ratoath. There are also problems in extending it to the Baltinglass area of Wicklow, where we have not been able to find an alternative meaningful source, and to Rathdrum and Aughrim, where very poor supplies are hanging on by a thread. Those areas should really be supplied from the Vartry system, and will be with the plans we have in place.

The charts show the picture from now until 2025. The seventeenth slide shows the increase in domestic and non-domestic demand that we anticipate. This is all in the context of significant social and economic progress in the region, reflected in housing growth and jobs growth. This will require a very significant and sustainable reduction in leakage, which will have to be ongoing nearly 365 days a year, not just for ten or 100 days of the year. We are factoring in the fundamental measures that every water utility worth its salt incorporates in its system, namely, a peaking factor that deals with seasonal variations and resilience against events that happen in every water system, like a pollution event or a drought. Events of that kind will ensure that we have less water in Poulaphouca than we need. We know from statistics that the current rate of demand from the Liffey would mean four failures in the past 62 years. At the current rate of extraction, without additional water, we would have had restrictions in Dublin In 1975, 1976, and 1995. We have a very serious problem that has to be addressed.

Obviously a project like this is a multi-generational project. This project will not be built for ten or 20 years. It will be built for the long term, just like Vartry in the 1860s and Poulaphouca in the 1930s and 1940s. This is a project that will sustain the region for a very long time. We have taken 2050 as a reasonable planning horizon. Over that period, we are projecting domestic demand growth of just under 1% per annum. Housing will be growing by 1.3% per annum based on the projections. Non-domestic demand shows compound growth of 1.25% per annum. That is about half the projected economic rate of growth, reflecting our expectation that water use will be more efficient than a straightforward reflection of the rate of overall economic growth.

That is about half the projected rate of economic growth, which reflects the fact that we expect water use to be more efficient than overall economic growth would suggest. I have discussed the leakage targets. We are talking about hitting 20%. A target of 20% is not achieved in any water utility in any part of Britain or Ireland, with the possible exception of Anglian Water which runs at just under 20%. We have put in a very modest strategic provision which has been scaled back to 30 million l a day. As a country with significant water resources in a world which is increasingly water stressed, there is huge opportunity for Ireland to pitch for businesses that have a significant demand for water such as microelectronics, pharmaceuticals, agrifood and so on. Ireland, along with a limited number of other countries, is in a unique position to avail of that opportunity, particularly in a world in which water scarcity is very much becoming the reality.

To look briefly at how we went about this and at where we are with the current appraisal of options, as I said we initially had seven variations on the Shannon option which were identified as far back as 1996. I will come back to those in a minute. We looked at the Barrow and at how it could be combined with the Liffey but the reality is that Poulaphouca is fully filled by the Liffey system. There is nothing extra we can do in wintertime to get Poulaphouca more secure than it is. Therefore there is no possibility of running river abstraction beyond what we are taking at Athy without impacting many other abstractions and other uses.

In terms of groundwater, there are decades of models, testing and assessments which have been carried out on the groundwaters around the greater Dublin area. In the 1970s and 1980s, prior to current environmental legislation, there might have been some chance of getting water, for example, in the Curragh. It was tested at various times, although never successfully and with huge opposition from those using the land, such as the equestrian industry, because of the potential impact on the groundwater. The best example of groundwater exploitation in the region was intended to be the Bog of the Ring. It was the holy grail. It was going to produce 20 million l to 30 million l a day. It got to 3 million l and has now been scaled back to 2.5 million l because the water simply is not there. At the moment the environmental designations which exist in this area, the horticulture industry in north Dublin and all the various land use activities would mean that, if one had to, at the very best one could get 0.5 Ml from a borehole here and there which could be combined in a very expensive and very complex network in order to get modest amounts of water, but that is as far as one would get.

There is no major water supply for the greater Dublin area available from groundwater, but it will always be important for local land use. It is also critically important for the environment of the Pollardstown fens; the Curragh system, as I have said; and so on. There is a huge number of constraints. By the way, this groundwater underpins the base flows of the Liffey and the Boyne. That is the critical point. Both of those rivers would be depleted by large scale abstraction of groundwater, therefore one would be robbing from Peter to pay Paul.

The situation is similar in respect of desalination. Desalination is a technically feasible option in countries which have no choice. It is extremely expensive, extremely complex and difficult to operate. I recently spoke to both Thames Water and Melbourne Water about their experiences of desalination. They said that it was horrendously expensive and very difficult to run. They also said that it is very difficult to get the water quality right for consumption. We would have to try to blend it with the surface waters. Running river water provides perfectly good, safe, clean water right across this country. Whether we are talking about Cork, Waterford, Galway or Sligo, every one of those major schemes works off river water. Groundwater is the main means of supply in south Wexford and a few other areas of the country, including parts of the midlands, but the rest is served by the run of the river. There is no suggestion from any scientific person that there is a health issue or a trihalomethane issue with properly treated surface water. Where we have those problems it is because no proper treatment plants were provided back over the decades. We are now retrofitting those. Surface waters are absolutely reliable and safe and we are very lucky to have very good quality surface waters for treatment for use as drinking water.

The bottom line is that all of those options have been looked at exhaustively. We have a massive problem to deal with. We have a scheme which has now been identified and which has now been designed in enough detail to be very confident of the cost. The costing which we now have, €1.2 billion, includes all of the overheads and costs above and beyond construction costs. Construction costs are still €850 million to €900 million, but all of the other costs relating to overheads, management, delivery, procurement and all of that will bring the cost to about €1.3 billion eventually. It represents 2% of the Shannon's waters at Parteen, which would be taken directly from the water which would be otherwise used in power generation. That compares with 41% of the Liffey's waters. I doubt there is a river in Europe which is used to that extent sustainably.

On the public consultation, we had a very significant engagement, which is detailed in the report. We have had more than 200 written submissions. We are treating every one of those as bona fide. We have considered them very carefully. In the detailed written response to those submissions which we have provided we have tried to give factual clear answers to the best of our ability. There is no question we will not answer on this scheme. There is no detail we will not stand over. We are absolutely determined to build trust and confidence in this project because it is absolutely critical to the future social and economic development of the midlands and eastern region.