Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The location in Limerick city will be one that will best reflect the air quality in the city as a whole. Currently, the EPA has 31 stations to try to give a read across the country, which is virtually impossible to do. By doubling the number of stations, it will be able to give a far more accurate national read and it will be able look at locations in our cities that can best and accurately reflect what is going on in those cities. The EPA will use a scientific formula in that regard. It will be possible to monitor the output from all the plants in the mid-west catchment and, in the near future, to tabulate those against the reading in the two new stations and the three monitoring stations. All of that information will be live.

On the timeframe, I recently met board members of the EPA who outlined their proposals for upgrading the monitoring network. I fully support these proposals and confirmed to them at that time that my Department will provide whatever funding is required. The director general of the EPA, Ms Laura Burke, has since written to me with an estimate of the additional resources required by the agency - capital and current funding of €5 million over five years, with five additional staff with specialist expertise in air quality monitoring and forecasting. The extra resources will enable the EPA to provide extra support to local authorities in developing new capabilities in air quality monitoring and I very much welcome the proposal to expand the network and look forward to the EPA developing its capacity to meet the future air quality needs of Irish citizens. The physical roll-out of the network is the easy part, and the EPA has been actively involved in that since my discussion with it, but the actual analysis, predictions and using that data will be the bigger challenge, which is why I have approved the additional staffing.

On the timeline for the specific locations, very specialist equipment has to be ordered in. The EPA is finalising its list of locations. I have given it the go-ahead on the capital side and, from a financial point of view, there is no reason many of those stations cannot be rolled out this year but I do not know, from a logistical point of view, the timelines involved in providing power and providing network connections back. The important thing is that once they are installed, they are live so that the public in Limerick and every other part of the country can see exactly what is happening at their particular station or a network of stations around that catchment. I hope this can be done as quickly as possible and I will ask the EPA to come back to Senator O'Donnell with timelines on the roll out of the network, specifically the two proposed stations in County Limerick.