Ms Emma Kennedy:

Sure. I will respond first to Deputy Ó Broin. He raised a question about how engineers are telling him that as things stand on the ground - they are dealing with a very difficult situation - they need increased supply. It is not surprising they are saying that. Of all the water going into Dublin's water supply system today, most of it is being lost through leaks. This does not make the engineers' lives any easier. They must put a certain volume of water into the supply system regardless of the fact that only 43% of it is actually being used. The other 57% - and we will come to that number - is disappearing into the ground. If leakage were much reduced, which it should be, they would essentially have an entire new source of water in reserve that they could put into the water supply system. Naturally, they are dealing with the real situation on the ground. Leakage is a key issue and a key part of this. Another key part of it is the infrastructure. Historically, as I said, that has been the water treatment plants. All the major ones have now been upgraded, apart from Vartry, which is about to be upgraded. The other key part of this is deployment, that is, the ability to move freely all the water that is put into the water supply system around the entire system. Historically, this has been a big problem. I saw the figures Irish Water cited in its slides today as water that is available for distribution input. That is not actually the total water available for supply; that is clearly being deducted for these deployment issues. Therefore, the numbers the members see in Irish Water's table are not the total numbers. The numbers from its own report are for 2015, when its production capacity was 623 million l. I cannot find the correct slide but it cites a much smaller number. I think I wrote it down; it is 598 million l. The number that is being cited is smaller than the total volume of water that is actually available for supply, according to Irish Water's data. I believe this is because Irish Water is reducing that for deployment issues. Irish Water stated in its final options appraisal report that four major ongoing projects will address these deployment issues and, in its words, make all this water freely deployable throughout the entire water supply system. These are Irish Water's words, not mine. Once those four deployment projects that Irish Water has identified have been completed, the job of the engineers on the ground will be significantly easier because they will be able to move that amount of water freely throughout the system. I think that answers the question about the problems right now. This possibly relates to other questions as well. As I said, the Kennedy Analysis position is not that Dublin does not need a supplementary water source - we believe it does - but that, mathematically, in terms of what is needed to be put in, once the infrastructure issues are addressed there will be plenty of water for Dublin.

The Deputy then made the point about London, and Mr. Grant has talked quite a lot about London and its leakage levels. There is a lot to be said on this, and I will try to keep my comments brief. London is often used by Irish Water as a comparator with Dublin because the supply systems are of a similar age and nature. London has made great strides in the past 20 years in improving its supply system. Mr. Grant said that the highest rate at which they have been replacing pipes in London is 1.3%. I would love to see Irish Water's data for that. Our understanding, based on data in our analysis, is that the figure is closer to 3%, even in recent years. London's Thames Water missed its leakage target last year for the first time in 11 years. As a reaction to this, and as a response to its customers' feedback, it is ramping up its leakage reduction efforts. In the upcoming window from 2020 to 2025, London, despite the fact that it is now operating at a leakage level around half that of Dublin, will reduce its leakage in absolute terms by 15%. During essentially the same window - a year later, from 2021 to 2026 - the plan for Dublin is to reduce leakage by 7.7%, that is, half the leakage reduction for a system that has twice the leakage. To go into London a little more, again, in its efforts to ramp up its leakage reduction, Thames Water has said it is looking to employ more people, to have more feet on the ground and to invest in new technology to allow it to meet its newly upgraded target. It has published its draft water resources management plan for next year, which anyone here can view. There is a lot of information in it about its plans on leakage. It had been planning for that upcoming window to reduce leakage by just 9%. The answer it received from customer feedback - and it spoke to thousands of its customers - was that leakage is their top priority. Thames Water therefore increased that 9% target to 15%. We are therefore talking about far more ambitious targets in London than those we see in Ireland. Does that answer the Deputy's questions on London?

On groundwater, we have raised many issues about the analysis that was done for this report into groundwater. The only report that was done into groundwater for this project was produced in 2008. Irish Water's own adviser described that as "a high, desktop-study level, on limited data". The report itself stated it had to rely on studies and data "that have been collected by many individuals ... for a variety of purposes and therefore will be variable in depth and strict relevance to the main focus of this report". The report continues, "Nevertheless, this is considered to be acceptable for the type and general nature of this report."

That report was produced in 2008. It repeatedly described itself as conservative. It has also been described as too conservative by many commentators.

The report was constrained in various bizarre ways. Instead of considering water resources within, for example, such as Dublin's existing water treatment plants or within 80 km of the periphery of the supply area, the report considered a zone centred on downtown Dublin. That seems strange because everybody knows one is not going to drill a bore hole in downtown Dublin. The report also set out various tests that were incorrectly applied. For example, the report identified aquifers. If one is considering pumping that water to the supply system then for it to be valid option one needs a certain volume of water. If one considers aquifers that are further away then, legitimately, they need to be bigger.

The report set out what it described as a resource and distance threshold that it then applied. However, the resource and distance threshold test itself stated that the distance had to be the distance between the aquifer and the point of distribution or use, in other words, the closest point to which one can get into the water supply system, be that the water treatment plant or the nearest part of the pipes. The test was applied incorrectly. Instead of measuring that distance it measured the distance from the aquifers to downtown Dublin. When Irish Water took the project on in 2014 it undertook a desktop or desk-based review of that earlier desk-based study. Irish Water failed in its review to take account of the fact that by then the nature of the supply area had expanded significantly and also several other matters that I shall describe in a moment. Let us not forget that the original application found that six out of 19 aquifers that had been identified had potential but the original report said that only six of them were close enough. If the test had been reviewed correctly at the time of the review by Irish Water then it would have found, by that point, that 11 out of the 19 aquifers were now valid. The review discarded what was known as a regionally important aquifer. Notwithstanding that the aquifer then fell within the new expanded supply zone, it was disregarded because it was too far from downtown Dublin.

Members will have received some background information on groundwater before today. We raised a whole raft of questions about groundwater, including these errors and several more, with Irish Water. Not a single one of these errors has been addressed. Our issue with groundwater is not that things change and there is suddenly more water under the ground today than there was in 2008 or, indeed, in the reports that the 2008 review relied upon. Our point is that there were errors in the original report and, more significantly, there were errors in the review conducted by Irish Water. We have flagged these in significant detail and not a single one of our questions has ever been addressed.

In terms of groundwater as a resource, between 25% to 35% of the Irish water supply comes from the ground and in London it is around 30%. One of the greatest claims for Paris is its diversification and security of supply. All academics concur that to have security of supply one needs a variety of types of water sources. Paris gets 50% of its water source from the ground. There is a significant amount of groundwater located close to Dublin and this very conservative report reached the same conclusion. It is important that groundwater is reassessed on the correct basis because it would offer diversification and a sufficient supply of water to Dublin once the correct demand figures have been accounted for. Have I covered all of the questions on groundwater?