Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Managing our water resource effectively is a key economic issue that we must face. We have 18,000 people on public water supplies that have a boil water notice or other restrictions. The EPA has determined that remedial action is required on supplies that are at risk, which include large supplies in Dublin and Cork, affecting a million people. We have significant supply constraints in Dublin. Where we normally have a cushion of 15% on supply, we now have 3% or 4%. There is water unaccounted for, meaning there are leaking water pipes costing a lot of money. Some €1.2 billion comes from the taxpayer and 40.8% of the water is leaking. Thirty-six percent of our wastewater treatment plants did not meet our effluent standards in 2011 and European Commission has launched a pilot infringement in respect of 80 of those plants. That is the legacy I inherited. I was faced with the challenge of deciding which programmes we would cut further in the context of a troika programme in order to deal with these serious issues. We had to provide good-quality water to meet water quality directives in 2016 and 2021, and this required a capital investment of €600 million per annum, which is almost triple what we spent this year and last year. We have €500 million of investment projects on hold because we did not have the money. We have no hope of meeting those objectives without having some new initiative to deal with it.

We set up a study that did not cost a whole lot of money. We studied the situation internationally to see what we could do. The best way to roll out additional capital investment was to set up a semi-state commercial body and link it not to a greenfield site but to an existing State body to save money. Bord Gáis and Bord na Móna were the existing State companies that bid for it. We made savings because we used existing systems and expertise up to now. And I would ask Deputy Barry Cowen-----