Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I pay tribute to the water services staff who, as we are all aware and as we speak, are out working exceptionally hard to bring the water system back into proper order. I also want to say at the outset that I fully understand the scale of the weather event and the impact that would always have had on the water system.

Today, as it stands, 1.2 million people in the greater Dublin area are affected by water reductions and outages, 20,000 households outside the greater Dublin area are without water, another 47,000 have reduced supply, and thousands of households are affected by boil-water notices. I am concerned by the lack of adequate forewarning, particularly in those higher risk areas where the headroom is so low. If people had been given earlier warnings prior to the event, they could have made greater efforts to prepare for the worst.

There also was a lack of consideration of emergency supply, also particularly in those areas that were likely to be worst affected in the worst case scenario. I note, for example, some local authorities in London put in place emergency supplies in advance for those areas that they anticipated would be affected by water outages.

There is a huge amount of misrepresentation about the cause of the current supply problem, particularly in Dublin. This is not directed at any political party - it is more at some sections of the commentariat. One would think that the entire city and surrounding counties had been leaving on their taps for days on end to avoid leakages when, in fact, both Mr. Gerry Grant and his senior colleagues have made it clear that the primary problem here is serious leakages caused by the weather event in the public system as well as difficulties in a number of the reservoirs.

Does the Minister accept specifically in relation to the water issue that more preparation could have been done? What is he doing to ensure such disruption is kept as short as possible? Will the Minister review the capital investment programme for Irish Water to ensure that increased investment is provided next year to tackle the decrepit nature of the infrastructure?

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