Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Irish Water is involved in the solution in a high percentage of cases because the infrastructure can quite easily be tapped into its network and so forth. It will be in charge of that. In other cases they are rural areas which are a little more difficult, but individual solutions will be found as well. The key part is that we use the pilot scheme and enable the knowledge on this. Irish Water and local authorities are fundamental to the solutions, and the funding is allocated to the local authorities to carry out this work. They will be in charge of and oversee the work.

Regarding the present and the future, planning has changed completely in the last seven or eight years since we have been in government in terms of how it is managed and regulated. This cannot and would not be allowed to happen again. I am confident of that because we made sure to change it with regulations and the changes we made in the context of how we approach planning and development. With regard to servicing lands in the future, there are proposals on the desk of the Minister - these will be announced shortly - regarding Irish Water and what will happen in the future. We are also looking at a more joined-up approach between local authority development plans and Irish Water's spending plans. There cannot be development without infrastructure now. That does not happen any more.

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