Mr. Andy Fanning:

On the issue of whether water quality in our rivers and lakes is declining or improving, the EPA has produced many reports in recent years. Our water quality in Ireland reports are produced on a three-yearly basis and we also produce an annual water indicators report.

We saw some improvements to about 2012 but they have been declining since. We expect the next three-year report will be out within the next quarter or two. We will have the overview then. We did and still do assist the Department in its river basin management planning, which looks at that work, and we provide the evidence on which it develops the plans for all the stakeholders to implement. There has been a decline in overall water quality in rivers and lakes over the last decade.

I refer to the question of our confidence in Irish Water following up on the actions we require of it. In our audit reports, we set out our recommendations. We give Irish Water a month to respond to us and we find that, as one would expect if there are number of recommendations, some of them will need to be dealt with immediately and some of them will take a certain amount of time and investment to be delivered. It provides us with a response to the audit recommendations and then we track that every quarter and we get a response from Irish Water on all open cases once every quarter. We track each of the individual actions that have been set out in our audit reports, and as they progress, if we find there is an unacceptable delay, we have the ability to go back out and issue a legal direction to it undertake to either provide us with the action plan for delivering on the action or to carry out the specific action within a specified time. We actively track that and we actively ensure the actions we seek are being undertaken. It is part of my work programme to do that on a continuous basis.