Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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Question 202: To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources if he is satisfied that the Groundwater Survey of Ireland has sufficient resources to provide timely responses to requests for technical backup from local authorities and enquiries from the general public. [19197/07]

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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Question 203: To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources the status of the Goundwater Survey of Ireland detailing outstanding requests, from local authorities; if he will provide a date by which it is proposed to complete the survey; if he will provide a date by which all the data from the survey will be available in digital format for general use. [19198/07]

Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 202 and 203 together.

The Groundwater Programme is one of the priority programmes of the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI). In recent years it has necessarily devoted considerable resources to supporting the implementation of groundwater aspects of the EU Water Framework Directive and this has resulted in the deferment of some of its work for local authorities. These delays have been exacerbated by delays in replacing experienced professional staff that have left GSI in recent years. I am pleased to note that GSI intends to recruit a new permanent senior geologist for the groundwater programme and this in turn will facilitate the employment of additional consultants to undertake work for local authorities. The county-based Groundwater Protection Scheme (GWPS) is an important support for local authority planners and each county scheme typically takes two years to complete for a small team. At present schemes are completed for approximately half the country. GSI regularly receives requests from local authorities; at present it is undertaking schemes for Counties Cavan and Galway, and has requests from an additional four counties. While specific completion dates for these requested schemes cannot be provided at present, GSI does keep in contact with requesting local authorities and negotiates project milestones in keeping with its available resources. Completed GWPS maps are provided to relevant local authorities for use on their intranet and extranet, and have been available digitally through the GSI dedicated web mapping system since 2005. Earlier this year it was decided that all GSI data holdings would be provided free of charge in digital format through a web delivery system.

Completed GWPS have been migrated as part of the data holdings which were made available earlier this month, forming a key part of the first phase of this new web delivery initiative. It is hoped that this service will facilitate members of the general public in seeking groundwater information. It should also reduce the time taken to answer those queries where the personal attention of staff is necessary and for which the response time is currently up to one month.