Mr. Jerry Grant:

Capital is not a constraint on this. It is absolutely not a constraint. I cannot predict the future but today, capital is not a constraint. It is about getting out there with the crews on the ground, finding and fixing the leaks, deploying the technology and building up the capital replacement programme behind it. We plan to do that steadily but will accelerate it if we need to. It has to be justified and has to deliver a return. This is the fundamental point. We could replace the old Vartry mains into Stillorgan for €65 million but what would we get for it? Three or four megalitres of savings. It would make absolutely no sense. We have lots of very good cast iron pipes in this city that are 100 years old and that should not be replaced and could not be replaced on a value basis because it is not the priority and would not save the water. Issues like future drinking water do not impinge at the moment on our capital planning. They have no bearing on it.

We could talk about aquifers all day but, as I said to the Deputy, the groundwater bodies around the greater Dublin area have not changed in the last 100 years. All of the data that was ever produced in terms of modelling and boreholes and so on is collated by Geological Survey Ireland, GSI. That is their job, they are the specialists. All the experienced hydrogeologists who have worked on it are basing their work on that data. For that family of hydrogeologists in Ireland who understand the groundwater issues, the primary issues are related to the yield we can get over the distribution. The idea that we could identify a borehole, for example, and just pump it into the nearest part of the pipe system is nonsense. We simply cannot do that. We must bring the water to a reservoir where it can be blended with the other water and put into supply in a managed way. Going into Portlaoise we have 12 Ml of water, which is procured over an area of 14 sq. km and then pumped 17 km to the town. That is the scheme there. If we try to replicate that for 100, 200 or 300 Ml we are talking about a system that we could never technically develop or manage and for which we would certainly never get approval.

In terms of scale, Deputy Mattie McGrath mentioned the fact that this is a once-and-for-all scheme. A new water supply scheme takes 20 years from start to finish. We have schemes all over the country. I can think of Clonmel, for example, where a new regional scheme based on the Suir is very urgently required, because there is a very poor quality supply. We are working on that.

However, it is taking significant time to do the same work that we are doing on this scheme to get it to An Bord Pleanála, hopefully, in the next six to nine months and built over the next six or seven years. That is the timescale involved. The scheme is presented as something on a vast scale. While it is a big project costing €1.2 billion or €1.3 billion, the Vartry reservoir was built in 1865 with picks and shovels and it served the city for 70 years. In its day, it was a bigger challenge politically, economically and technically. When the Poulaphouca scheme was developed in the late 1930s, huge areas were flooded and a massive dam was constructed while there has been significant work since to get the water into Dublin. The scheme has also broadly served the city region for 70 years. However, those systems are now exhausted and the deployment work referred to comprises projects we are doing to shift water between the various schemes and make sure the last drop of water we can produce can be delivered, which is the challenge.

On the question of per capitademand, nobody knows what domestic side leakage is. Householders fixed leaks and we fixed leaks together in the first fix free scheme throughout the country that saved water, which on the customer meter amounted to 100 million l of which 25 million l were in Dublin. Less than one third of that was reflected back at the source because when a customer's leak is fixed, the neighbours' water pressure improves and they get a better service. Other leaks then develop. It is just like leakage on the system where a dividend of 20% or 30% is generated but then new leaks happen. Plumbing systems continually develop leaks on washers, WCs and so on. That goes on all the time. Every frost causes bursts on service pipes that are too shallow. That will continue because we will never get to the point where we can replace all of them. We will have customer side leakage. It is included in theper capita figure in these numbers.

This is where we have clarity compared with Britain, for example. We have predicted the future demand of the domestic population of Dublin and the midlands region at 135 l per head. If this was done in Britain, they would quote 150 l per head because they use 130 l for metered properties and they assume 160 l for unmetered properties. We have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that demand will be 135 l per head, inclusive of leakage. That figure is derived from the customer data we have. It is a conservative assumption to make and we could not resile from that. That is the minimum figure used for planning throughout Europe. A small number of countries can point to lower per capitaconsumption because they have user charges at high rates, for example, Denmark and Germany. Other than those, 135 l per head, inclusive of leakage is considered a low number to the planning for. Nobody knows how much leakage there will be in that. If 20% of that is leakage, that represents 7% or 8% of total water production. If we could, in turn, find 20% of that, it would represent 2% or 3% of total water production. That is the reality in respect of 800,000 domestic dwellings in the midlands and eastern region. Any fast thinking, logistical study of what one might reasonably get back from these, working with each of them as private citizens in control of their own plumbing systems and their own behaviours, would say one would be doing a brilliant job if one could save 1% of that water. To suggest there is a Holy Grail in domestic leakage is unbelievable.