Mr. ?anna Rowe:

The way we have structured the fees is exactly as the Deputy described it. There is a fee for unserviced sites in rural and suburban locations and there is a different fee for serviced sites. If you require no services and all you want is a houseboat permit that gives you certain rights, the fee for that in a rural unserviced location is €500. The balancing act we are trying to provide here is to keep our navigations as true navigations for navigation purposes, in other words, so that people want to travel our wonderful waterways. What we are really conscious of is the situation in which some English canals have found themselves where they are choked and true navigation is no longer possible. We are trying to achieve a balancing act. There will be a limit to the number of houseboat locations and houseboat permits. We have structured this in such a way that we have a tiered approach to the permit fees that are required.