Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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I welcome our guests. I am going to talk about the Shannon pipeline. We have discussed this in a private meeting before, but I would like to address the issue in public. I put on record my deep concern that colleagues from the mid-west are not in attendance to discuss what is a very important issue for our region. Whether you are in Clare, Limerick or Tipperary, you should be very concerned and tuned into this project that is being proposed to take a substantial amount of water from the Shannon to the east of the country. I wanted to note my concern. I see a number of Dublin representatives here and they want this pipe to be built as quickly as possible so we can build more houses in Dublin and it can grow and get bigger. That is something we need to be very careful about. We have a national planning framework which is about balanced development in the country. We are going to have a review of the national planning framework imminently. I would like to hear the officials' thoughts on how they are handling the review of the framework in their planning of the project.

From our previous private discussions, the officials might confirm on the record that the primary reason to build this pipe across the country is that the resilience of the network around Dublin, the Liffey basin and the east coast simply does not exist. It is effectively to avert a calamity. If something were to happen to the Liffey supply in particular, that would be catastrophic for a huge segment of our population. Is it the case that is the primary reason?