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

I welcome that direct engagement. The EPA's audits are very valuable and very useful and are produced in a way that those of us who are not technical experts in the field can fully understand. The Minister is absolutely right. The ongoing upgrading of the filtration system in the old part of the plant which supplies 20% of the water to the greater Dublin area is, as far as we understand, the primary cause of yesterday's event. The EPA, however, said in the recommendations of its October audit and in committee today that even when the capital works currently funded in the programme and under way are completed, there will still be a risk of the kind of event that happened yesterday if we do not move towards a UV disinfection system. When we asked Irish Water about this, we asked how much such a system would cost to introduce and how long it would take. It told us that it would cost tens of millions of euro and take several years. I am not asking for the Minister to intervene in the ordinary day-to-day running of Irish Water or in the work of the EPA, but Irish Water, on foot of the recommendation in the October report, may take the view that it needs an additional disinfection system. This could be introduced in parallel but it would need additional funding from the Minister's Department not this year, or necessarily even next year, but over the next two or three years. It is on that matter that I am asking the Minister to engage positively with not only the EPA, but with Irish Water, so that we do not finish this piece of work only still to risk an event such as that affecting hundreds of thousands of households in Dublin and surrounding counties because we did not introduce the UV disinfection system.

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