Brian Stanley (Laois, Independent)
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It depends on the review of the national development plan. It is €4.6 billion.

On the cost of connections, a person is building a rural house where the pipe has to go across a field, not across the runway of an airport or motorway, just green grass in his field. It is not a long distance. You could throw a stone from the road, where the mains is, to the house. He got a bill, which he showed me, for more than €27,000. That is seriously high. I showed the letter to people who worked providing water connections in the council up to a few years ago and they said it would have come in at a fraction of that sum. Is there an option for people to lay the pipe themselves? Much of the conversation today has been about the difficulty in servicing new estates and I understand that. Builders are coming to me about that as well but this is an area where we can help or let people help themselves. If the householders or people building the house - it is a young couple with a family in this case, who are living in a temporary dwelling and trying to get a house built on land in his home place - were able to lay the pipe themselves and bring it to the road, will Irish Water facilitate that? It is one way we could speed up the delivery of housing, at least in rural areas.