Ms Angela Ryan:

As Mr. Gleeson was saying at the outset, we have requested an additional €300 million within this investment cycle to support rural housing, and the majority of that money will be spent on wastewater infrastructure projects within small towns and villages. One of the issues with small wastewater is the lead-in time for those projects. A very small wastewater project has to go through exactly the same consenting process as a medium or large wastewater treatment project. You still have to get licence applications, go through a formal planning consenting process and then get a wastewater discharge authorisation afterwards. That can add significant time to the process. As part of that rural housing initiative, Uisce Éireann is seeing if we can progress simplification in the lead-in times for such projects. They are very small and they represent a small and insignificant amount of environmental load. Therefore, they should potentially be treated in a slightly different way. We are interfacing with the EPA and other bodies such as the Department to try to work out how we could progress more standardisation within small wastewater projects and, therefore, accelerate the rate at which we can roll out new small wastewater treatment plants. Much of the focus should be placed on getting the processes working whereby the infrastructure provider can actually provide the service within rural communities.

In parallel to that, as the Deputy said, we have to be able to react. We are working with the Department of housing on trying to develop some standard specification designs and go through processes that look at how we might have individual mechanisms for developer-provided infrastructure as interim measures.