I welcome the students and teachers from Confey College. I was on the board for ten years.

Today I raise a fundamental local issue in Leixlip, Celbridge and Maynooth where we had another water outage this week. We have had a number of water outages affecting over 10,000 houses and 25,000 people. Indeed, the students in the Gallery, along with those in other schools, were not able to go to school on Monday because of the outages. This year we had outages on 24 February, 3 April and 27 April combined with six or seven last year and the previous year. I have raised it as a councillor and as a TD and I take the opportunity to raise it again today. Unfortunately, this impacts the most vulnerable in our society, including the oldest and the youngest people and our businesses. I was in contact with one business that only opened six months ago and has had to close for five days. We have given significant money to Uisce Éireann. We need to build houses but we also need to look after those people who have houses and ensure they have the vital infrastructure.

I join with Deputy Neville in welcoming the students from Confey College. Before I get to the seriousness of the water burst, if you got a day off school for that and a day in the Dáil, it is not a bad week, and there is a bank holiday on Monday. They are welcome and it is great to have them in Leinster House.

The point my colleague and friend, Deputy Neville, makes is a serious one. I know it is one he has been campaigning on and highlighting for quite a while. We have rightly resourced Uisce Éireann to a significant degree. It is now important that it engages with communities to come up with solutions. I know it is committed to solving and replacing the necessary section of the mains water network that the Deputy has highlighted and there is now a funded capital project in place to address that issue. I am told the project is at design stage and that it is a somewhat of a complex design process owing to the challenges in reinforcing an existing pipe or routing a replacement given the congested nature of the route. It obviously needs to do this while trying to maintain capacity to meet present and future demand. A number of solutions are being investigated but in the interim, immediate steps have been taken to respond to bursts in the area and to try to manage supply interruptions. On foot of the Deputy raising this today, I will ask that Uisce Éireann come back to him directly.