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EY CEO Outlook: Leading Ireland’s Water Strategy with Niall Gleeson, CEO of Uisce Éireann
In this episode of the EY CEO Outlook podcast, Niall Gleeson, Chief Executive Officer of Uisce Éireann, joins host Richard Curran to discuss the major challenges of managing Ireland’s water infrastructure. Niall reflects on his career journey, the infrastructure issues facing the country, and his vision for the future of Uisce Éireann.
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Niall Gleeson was 13 years old when he realised he wanted to be an engineer. Influenced by his grandfather, whose love of tinkering and ham radio sparked Niall's curiosity for how things worked, he developed a passion for taking things apart and understanding the mechanics behind them.
After earning his engineering degree from Bolton Street College in Dublin, Niall began his career with General Electric in the United States, where he installed gas turbines and power plants. He went on to lead major infrastructure projects across the UK, and Asia before moving back to Ireland to work with Shanahan Engineering.
They also discuss:
- Infrastructure Challenges: €60 billion in investment is needed to bring Ireland’s water infrastructure up to modern standards.
- River Shannon to Dublin Pipeline: 50% of the population will benefit from it. A vital solution for ensuring water supply not only to Dublin but also to towns along the way.
- Network Management: Ireland's 64,000 km water network had a leakage rate of 48-50%, now reduced to 31% in Dublin and 37% nationwide.
- Leadership approach: The importance of active listening and giving people time to find their solutions.
- Private vs Public Sector: difference between the sectors i.e taking on new tasks often means stopping old ones.
- Community Focus: Uisce Éireann’s vision is to deliver for communities.
- Housing Crisis and Infrastructure Capacity: Currently, the system can support around 30,000 new homes per year, which may not be sufficient for future housing needs.
- Water Conservation: Protecting Ireland's water resources and using them responsibly.
[00:00:00.08] Richard: Thanks, Carol. Niall. You're very welcome. We have lots to talk about in your own career, and how you plan to keep the water flowing for a growing population and economy into the future. But before we talk about the future, let's just look at the present when it comes to water. How big is the challenge that you face in fixing and transforming our water supply into the future?
[00:00:23.57] Niall: Yeah, I think it's no secret. There's been a huge lack of investment for the last, maybe 60 to 100 years in the water and wastewater infrastructure around the country. So since the inception of Uisce Éireann, in the last ten years, we've caught up a lot. But there's years of work to do, and we estimate somewhere around €60 billion worth of work to do to get the existing system up to standard. And that will take us 20, 30 years to get there.
[00:00:47.93] Richard: 60 billion?
[00:00:48.71] Niall: Yeah. It's an enormous figure. I mean, if you consider just keeping the existing system going is probably half a billion to three quarters of a billion a year just for capital maintenance of the existing works. And as we build new plant and equipment. You know, in 20 years time, that will all need to be refreshed. So this is just an ongoing investment in water and wastewater infrastructure that the country has to, you know, keep up with and keep delivering over the next decades.
[00:01:11.47] Richard: To some extent, that's because of maybe our own attitudes in Ireland towards water. There is this sense that we take it for granted, and that would have fed into many, many years of not doing the upgrades that were required. So there's a big catch up exercise.
[00:01:25.75] Niall: I think, you know, local authority water services, people have done a really good job of in a very limited budget of trying to keep things on the road. It has always been the poor cousin because, you know, opening a bypass or a new bridge is much easier on the political system than a wastewater treatment plant.
[00:01:43.39] Richard: Photographs of the new pipes under a road don't quite work as well as the photograph of the road.
[00:01:48.37] Niall: We actually bury a huge amount of our infrastructure. And like I opened something recently with Minister O'Brien and it was a €130 million project, vast catchments, you know, 40 meter down, 40 meter wide. Big underground pipes. But at the end of the day, what we opened was something that looked like a, you know, a small bungalow in the countryside, you know. So that was the above ground.
[00:02:07.75] Richard: And it isn't just a political thing. It's maybe a cultural thing as well, that because of our climate, because of our weather, we say, well, water's not a problem. We don't have a water problem, we have too much water. So therefore it's just brushed aside or has been in the past.
[00:02:22.24] Niall: I mean, I've been on radio shows where people have commented, you know, I'm standing here in the rain, it's lashing down and you're telling me you can't get it out of the taps? But there's a huge journey from getting rainwater, treating it, you know, purifying it, sterilizing it, and then getting it into the network and delivering it to your tap. That's a really complex journey and expensive journey. And people really don't have a concept of how difficult that is to achieve.
[00:02:43.66] Richard: The question of water and financing. It was a huge political issue around water charges a number of years ago. It fell the way it fell in the end. Do you think, though, that maybe because people feel that they don't pay for it, that they're more inclined to waste it, and they're more inclined to take it for granted.
[00:03:00.81] Niall: Yeah, I think that is true. I mean, people do take it for granted, but actually, water is relatively cheap, even in countries where they do pay for it. Even in those countries, I think they take it for granted and it is misused. But it's becoming a much more scarce resource. That's one of the challenges we're reaching. I mean, Dublin is struggling on the supplies it has at the moment. I do think it's an education thing and a learning thing and also, you know, some kind of incentive to conserve water.
[00:03:26.19] Richard: When you say Dublin is struggling, how immediate or serious an issue is that?
[00:03:30.84] Niall: For me, it's very serious. We want to build that pipeline from the Shannon and that has been talked about for the last maybe 30 years, you know, trying to get that water. The Liffey is a very small river really, in comparison to other rivers in the country, and it has a very small catchment. It's basically the Wicklow Hills, so it's quite vulnerable and it's going to become more vulnerable with climate change. So we really need to get another source into Dublin. I mean, for example, we recently did a big outage on the pipeline that runs from Ballymore Eustace, the big treatment plant up in Kildare down into Dublin, there's a 1.6m diameter pipe that brings nearly a third of the water for the city into town. That has leaks along it, and we fixed one of those leaks recently, but it was a 24 hour outage. We got it done on time, on schedule, but if that had gone to 36, 48 hours, people in Dublin would have started to run out of water. A third of the population.
[00:04:20.77] Richard: And the flip side of it is that the proposal to look at taking water from the Shannon will open up a whole lot of very strong views and emotive stuff that people have in that part of Ireland about maybe reducing water levels in the Shannon or water going from here to supply Dublin. And I don't live in Dublin and that's their problem over there.
[00:04:42.40] Niall: Yeah. Well first of all, look, the impact on the Shannon is going to be negligible. At the most we'll take, is about 3% of the flow in the water. And it'll be right down the bottom of the Parteen basin, just almost at Limerick city and 20km further it's into the estuary, into the sea. So really the impact on the Shannon is going to be minimal. I do understand people will see this big investment in their county that has no benefit to their county. It just, you know, it'll go up to Dublin. That's the way they see it. But actually the pipeline will feed towns and villages all the way up through the Midlands with the likes of Tullamore and Mullingar and these kind of places. So there would be.
[00:05:13.97] Richard: Benefits along the way as well.
[00:05:15.23] Niall: About a third of the water will be distributed along the route and then the final two thirds are in Dublin.
[00:05:19.70] Richard: What's the status of that project now, Niall?
[00:05:22.04] Niall: We've just got permission to go for planning. There's a public procurement process, the public spending code. So we've had what they call AG1, which is approval to go ahead and go for planning. Towards the end of next year. We will go for planning and hopefully that will get through. But we all know there's challenges around the planning process. We have one project called the Greater Dublin Drainage Project, a wastewater treatment plant up in Dunshaugh. We got permission for that back in 2019. It got challenged. It has been bouncing around the courts, an Bord Pleanála, still with an Bord Pleanála at the moment. So that would be my fear for this water supply project that had left similar challenges.
[00:05:56.61] Richard: Take a very long time. What about leaks? I mean, how many kilometers of pipeline do we have in the water system in Ireland, and how much are we losing?
[00:06:04.23] Niall: Yeah, so we've got about 64,000km of mains drinking water network, which is a huge network. It's not, you know, for the size of the country. Our spatial planning has never been greater. We have a lot of small settlements, quite dispersed population. So it's a rather inefficient system. Ideally you'd have a replacement rate of 1%, so 600km a year, but that would cost us our entire budget would be spent on just replacing pipes. So we do a very targeted programme of fixing leaks where they are. And then we do fix sections of pipes where the pipes are particularly old or troublesome. Right now, when we took over, the leakage rate in the country was in the region of 48 to 50%. We have it down to around 31% in Dublin now, and I think it's about 36, 37% for the rest of the country. So we are making progress. The challenge I've asked my team to deliver is in Dublin to be below 20% by the time the water supply project from the Shannon is running, so that's still a lot of leaks. But for an age-old system like Dublin's Victorian system, that's not a bad program, and I think we need new technologies. If we try to fix all the leaks in Dublin city, the roads would be dug up and the traffic situation would be crazy. It would make Luas cross City look like, you know, a weekend work. So we really have to target that. So we need new technologies to fix leaks when we get to below 20%.
[00:07:21.50] Richard: And are they there?
[00:07:22.46] Niall: There are technologies being developed and there are, you know, people running plastic inserts inside pipes and that kind of stuff. So those things do exist, but they need to be more sophisticated than they are to get. So.
[00:07:32.66] Richard: And if for some reason the Shannon solution doesn't happen, is there a plan B?
[00:07:39.41] Niall: We have some interim short term solutions, but a lot of them rely on their 4 or 5 years. It would you know, we'd be asking can we over abstract from the Liffey for a temporary period, assuming that the Shannon is coming in? If it doesn't happen, we're just going to run out of growth. We're not going to run out of water. You know, you and I, sitting at home won't run out of water in our taps. But we'll be saying no to future development. And no more houses, no more foreign direct investment, no more indigenous industry for the Dublin area. And further out, like the one big advantage of the Shannon project is it's going to allow us push water that is currently coming into Dublin. I say up north into Louth and Dundalk and down south into Wicklow and Wexford. So we will open up opportunities for those areas to grow as well with this whole supply. So we estimate that about 50% of the population will benefit from the Shannon. There is no plan B really. We need that water and countries looking at us. When we've talked to them about desalination, they're going. So you've got this big river over here and you're talking to us about taking water from the sea. Are you mad? You know, it's just that's your solution, you know?
[00:08:37.08] Richard: So it's something that, uh, (A) has to happen from what you're saying. And also will have benefits outside of Dublin.
[00:08:43.41] Niall: Yeah.
[00:08:44.28] Richard: Now we've talked about the scale of the issues, some of the challenges and the priorities that you have in Uisce Éireann. But I want to talk a bit about yourself, your own background, how you came to this point in your career, and we're going to do that just after this. So, Niall, you're an engineer by training. What attracted you to engineering?
[00:09:08.41] Niall: Yeah it's funny. My father, who's passed away, he was not an engineer. He was probably the furthest away from an engineer who's more academic, more languages, that kind of stuff. But my grandfather, you know, got involved in television when it was coming out. He was a ham radio expert, so I love spending time with him and talking to him. He passed away when I was about 12 or 13. He was a huge influence on me, though. So you have.
[00:09:28.96] Richard: Very strong memories of talking to him about stuff like that?
[00:09:31.84] Richard: Tinkering with radios with him and trying to set up my own ham radio. I don't think I was that successful, but yeah.
[00:09:36.58] Richard: Were you more of a take things apart than take them apart and try and put them back together?
[00:09:41.17] Niall: I wasn't as good at putting it back together as I was, you know. I'd taken them apart. So lots of bits lying around the garage that, you know, people were hoping I would someday repair, you know.
[00:09:48.97] Richard: So you were a bit of a fixer problem solver, were you?
[00:09:52.87] Niall: Yeah, I liked to, you know, do stuff. And I did a bit of DIY around the house, buying tools and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it was, I got into it early and I like all that kind of tinkering with stuff. And the draw of engineering was strong. I kind of wanted to be an engineer from the age of 13, and, you know, it.
[00:10:09.74] Richard: Was always going to be engineering for you.
[00:10:11.18] Niall: Yeah.
[00:10:11.42] Richard: So you went to college. You went to Bolton Street. What kind of engineering did you study?
[00:10:14.72] Niall: I did mechanical. Mechanical engineering.
[00:10:16.61] Richard: Did you like it?
[00:10:17.30] Niall: Yeah. I mean, look, engineering is actually a tough degree. It's, you know, you talk to some people doing commerce or arts or whatever, and they're in a few classes a week. Engineering is sort of a 40 hour a week course and tough enough degree to get through but some days, I remember having much fun in my third year and not doing so well in exams.
[00:10:34.82] Richard: Distractions Niall!
[00:10:35.51] Niall: Yeah. So but we all go through those phases, those challenges. But yeah, it was a good degree and I've enjoyed the jobs I've got since you know.
[00:10:42.77] Richard: And one of those jobs was when you joined GE that came about through a training program.
[00:10:47.84] Niall: Yeah, so back in the day when Ireland was a cheap place and wages were low. General Electric used to come over from the states and hire about 15 to 20 Irish engineers a year to go and install gas turbines, power plants all around the world. So you went off to Schenectady in New York, got trained there for six months, and then another six months, sort of on the job around the states, you know, worked in places like Memphis and New Johnsonville, Tennessee. So I know a lot of these towns where some have maybe Donald Trumps and JD Vance supporters come from, you know, interesting places.
[00:11:18.48] Richard: You were under the bonnet of the Rust Belt.
[00:11:20.58] Niall: Yeah, yeah, trailer parks and all that kind of stuff.
[00:11:23.10] Richard: And you traveled a lot with General Electric. You went to, like, Asia. You went all around the place.
[00:11:28.02] Niall: Yeah, yeah, I did jobs in Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand. So, yeah, really exciting at a time when not a lot of people were traveling to that level. Now, my daughter just came back from touring Southeast Asia, and it's like going to the south of Spain nowadays, you know what I mean? But in those days, very few people traveled to those places, and there weren't that many tourists either. You know, you were off the beaten track a bit.
[00:11:49.56] Richard: Was it tough to do engineering projects in those places, you would have had language barriers, cultural barriers, all kinds of things.
[00:11:57.65] Niall: Yeah it was, it was difficult. And you tended to be a lot more hands on than you would be in Ireland. Say you were in Ireland, you would have had engineers, you would have been technicians and mechanics and all that kind of stuff. A lot of the time in these places, the local guys weren't that well trained. So you'd have to do a lot of the physical work yourself, like rewiring junction boxes and helping them. But it was great training these guys. They really wanted to learn and they were enthusiastic. And, you know, even with broken English, when you're talking engineering, people can tend to understand you're looking at the same drawing. You'll understand the program flow and all that kind of stuff.
[00:12:26.60] And what kind of projects were you doing?
[00:12:28.67] Niall: Mostly it was either new power plants. So, you know, you'd be going into places where people didn't have electricity or had unreliable electricity, putting in brand new power plants. So it was good work. You know, they were being driven off gas, so carbon. This is 30 years ago. So we didn't know about the impacts. But you know, we were bringing electricity to people that didn't have it or upgrading electricity so.
[00:12:47.60] Richard: And of those different countries you lived in for a while and worked in, what was your favorite?
[00:12:52.17] Niall: It's hard to judge. Myself and my wife lived in Indonesia, in Jakarta for a year, and that was just so different from Ireland. I mean, there was 12 million people. There was open sewers on the streets, great atmosphere and loads to do. And it was, everything was exciting, you know. For two young kids. We were probably in our late 20s. It was a great place to live and a really great experience.
[00:13:13.38] Richard: Over the years with all of those projects. I mean, inevitably you must have had setbacks and things that went wrong. Problems. Any particular ones that you recall?
[00:13:22.47] There was one and it was one where I, where I started, my first kind of leadership job was in the UK, where the project was tailing off, and I was asked to become lead TA technical advisor. So basically. But it was just to run down the project and tidy up the books and that kind of stuff. But the rotors on these big machines, they were 100 ton rotors. The machines were generating about 300MW, which is enough to supply a small town. They started to break, so the bolts that held the rotors together started to break, and they were snapping inside the machines, destroying the machines. So this went from a wind down project to an enormous, like €1 billion at the end of it, of repairing these rotors at one stage, because the liquidated damages were, I think, a million a week when a million was worth something. We were flying rotors over to the states on Antonov aircraft to be.
[00:14:08.41] Richard: There's an awful lot at stake.
[00:14:09.79] Niall: Yeah, huge. And again, I was in my late 20s running, you know, crews of 100 people and flying, organising flights with Antonov and all this kind of stuff.
[00:14:17.86] Richard: Antonov's are these huge freight cargo planes!
[00:14:20.98] Niall: Yes, their the giant Russian planes, you know, they seem to land.
And it was funny when they landed. There's about six pilots, but there's about a crew of 12 who seem to get out and fix all the bits that broke while he was flying the last flight, you know? So yeah. Quite scary.
[00:14:33.28] Richard: You didn't take a lift home with them or anything?
[00:14:34.90] Niall: No. It was funny. When I was in the Kent airport, myself and my wife were watching this because a lot of people wanted to see it happening, and we were there with our little fiesta and the guy, they were refueling in Shannon because the fuel was duty free, and he did offer to fly us home with our car and to Shannon and I regretted not doing it, but at the time the project was in such chaos that I really couldn't have taken the 3 or 4 days off that it would have taken to get me back.
[00:14:58.40] Richard: And did you learn something about yourself in those situations where it gets stressful? How do you deal with pressure?
[00:15:06.44] Niall: I think having good people around you, I get stressed when I don't see a solution to a problem, even if the problem is big and I know there's a team on it that are going to get there. I'm less stressed around it. It's identifying the problem, getting the right people to sit on it and to deliver it. That's how you get over these problems. So I don't tend to get hugely stressed. And I think one of the early things I learnt in leadership is when people come in to talk to you, are they venting or do they want you to do something? Quite often managers jump in to do something and often they're just venting and people solve the problem as they're talking to you. Sometimes with a little bit of nudging, that skill is.
[00:15:40.10] Richard: But in order to have that, you need to know when to pull back or hold back and listen and let them do the talking.
[00:15:46.10] Niall: Yea, and it comes with experience, too. You know, when people are going to solve things and you know how to talk to people. I think people talk about active listening and all that nowadays, but it is important to not jump in with the solution straight away. I think it's to listen to people, listen how they talk. And actually as they talk themselves, they almost talk themselves through the problem quite often.
[00:16:04.56] Richard: But it's a real engineer's frame of mind. If you don't mind me saying Niall as well, that you have confidence and faith in a team to fix something, no matter how difficult it is, the engineer will always believe yes, if it's fixable, we're going to do it. The stress comes from the idea that there might not be a solution.
[00:16:22.35] Niall: Yeah, it's interesting because quite often with technical or financial people, there are lots of people who tell you 100 reasons why something can't be done. It's identifying the person who will give it a go is often the tricky thing. You know, with finance and engineering people, you tend to get promoted based on perfection. You know, if the balance sheet has to add up, the bridge can't fall down. So you have to be a good technical specialist. But when you get into management, you've got to let that go to some degree. You can't chase perfection all the time when you're dealing with people. You can't always get that delivered.
[00:16:52.64] Richard: That transition into management, what was that like for you? Were you comfortable with that? Was there a part of you that missed the more hands on go and fix it yourself?
[00:17:02.57] Niall: Yeah. I mean, I was a commissioning engineer, which is, you know, that's you're the prima donna at the end of a project, you come in and everyone has wired everything and built everything, and they're waiting for you to make the magic work, which is a great position and quite solitary in some ways. People rely on you, but you don't tend to rely on people. So going into management, it's a complete reverse of that. You're actually relying on people to do stuff for you. So that's a big transition. And again, this UK job I found my peers not turned on me, but became difficult because I was telling them what to do. And you'd go for pints in the evening and it would all be forgotten. That was a challenge trying to deal with, you know, people giving out and complaining and saying you're not doing the right job and all that kind of stuff, you know, in management. And that takes a bit of getting used to as well.
[00:17:43.82] Richard: And after that experience with General Electric around the world, you decided to come home. Why come home at that time?
[00:17:49.20] Niall: Yeah, well, as I said, my wife and myself were out in Jakarta for a year. Then we went to Finland and the UK. We spent time there, but we had our first child and you know, we went from running around the world with two holdalls each or something to now a 40 foot container of gear that you need when you have a child. And my jobs were short term-ish, so it wasn't going to be suitable for bringing up a child. So we didn't want Karen to live at home and me to travel. So we came back to Ireland and it was at the time when things were turning, you know, I left college in the mid 80s where the economy was crashing, but I came back to the late 90s and, you know, Ireland was really picking up. There was a lot of stuff going on.
[00:18:25.77] Richard: And there were different projects and different companies you worked with when you came home. One of them, am I right, Shanagher Engineering? [00:18:31.47] Niall: Yeah so I came back. I worked for Diageo for a very short term in the storehouse and that for a while. And then Shanagher Engineering contacted me and they were in this sort of international energy business, but based in Dublin. It was a great fit.
[00:18:45.15] Richard: And that was a company that was growing at that time.
[00:18:47.04] Niall: Yeah, when I joined, they had about 40 people in the field. So it was about providing field engineers at that time. When I left about eight years later, we had about 400 people in the field. So it was a family company, a family business, and they were transitioning from being the family business to being, you know, an organized, process driven business. And that was really interesting to be part of that sort of entrepreneurial type of thing. When you'd come from a very structured multinational like General Electric, you know.
[00:19:12.01] Richard: So what was it like then going in as CEO of Uisce Éireann. First of all, into the public sector rather than the private sector? Was that very different?
[00:19:20.05] Niall: Yeah, it is different now. I had worked for some of the big international companies, like I'd been with Alstom and we'd sold power plants into ESB, we had sold the Luas trams into the RPA. So I've been used to dealing with the public sector and knowing what levers work and what doesn't, and what the drivers are in the public sector. So it wasn't totally blown away with it. But it is different in the public sector and how they approach things. I mean, I spent all my life chasing gross margins, EBITDA, all that kind of stuff, and when you get into the public sector, nobody mentions that anymore. Now you're chasing cost control and you're managing expenses. And so don't you know we're not wasting money all the time. It's not striving for profit anymore, which is quite a different way of looking at things.
[00:19:58.01] Richard: From the outside there's often a perception between the private and the public that things move more slowly in the public sector, when you're actually inside the public sector, that isn't necessarily the case. It depends on what you do. What has to be done?
[00:20:12.08] Niall: Yeah. And there are restrictions and there are processes that you have to follow. And they tend to be a little bit more complicated in the public versus private. One of the big differences I've noticed is in the private sector, when you take on something new, you stop doing something that you used to do. So, you know, for example, you know, in the private sector, I had a business that wasn't making money and I shut it down and some customers rang me up and complained. But I just explained to them, look, it wasn't worth my while keeping delivering that service. So I had to shut it down. In the public sector, when you take on something new, it can be very difficult to stop what you're doing and to shut something down because you still have to provide that service. People expect it. So that's a real challenge. And it leads to inefficiencies. They're very hard to stop those inefficiencies because people expect from public services, good services. And you can't be as ruthless as you can be in the private sector.
[00:21:00.35] Richard: So it means then that a role can get bigger and bigger, and there can be greater draws on your time and energy.
[00:21:05.21] Niall: Yeah. And, you know, say new European standards come in for drinking water standards. We just have to take those on and we have to comply with those standards, which means upgrading the plants. The staff have to be retrained.
[00:21:16.01] Richard: You can't just say no!
[00:21:17.00] Niall: And you test more. So all that adds expense. But there's nothing on the other side that I can drop off and say, you know, we won't do this anymore, you know? So that's a challenge.
[00:21:25.13] Richard: The other thing about the public sector is that there are more stakeholders. It often feels more complex than the private sector. There's something a bit more straightforward about the private sector.
[00:21:37.40] Niall: Yeah. Well, like I said, if I go back to that example, I could ring those customers. And I said, look, we're just not delivering that service anymore. But there were other providers out there who could. Some of them weren't happy with it, but that was just a commercial decision, a business decision. And you've got to be tougher on that. With the number of stakeholders you have in the public sector, you don't have that luxury. You quite often, you just can't stop providing the service. If you do, you'll get various people pulling in. You can have political interference and you can have, you know, you can get a phone call from somebody to say, look, I know you want to do that, but you're not going to do it because the government doesn't want you to do that, you know? So there are challenges around that area, you know.
[00:22:12.71] Richard: How do you feel about the fact that the company, which is at its core, an engineering company, because it's about engineering, it's about providing water, wastewater, clean water, drinking water, the infrastructure that's required for that. And it all works. But because it affects so many people, you could very easily be very much in the public eye.
[00:22:33.17] Niall: We are an engineering driven company, but we want to become more customer, more community focused. That is kind of one of our mantras. Our vision is to deliver for communities and that requires a certain change within the organization as well. You know, when the answer on paper says we can't connect that housing estate or that business, then we need to look at it again to see is there another way to work around it? Is there more creative solutions? We are doing more and more of that.
[00:22:56.70] Richard: So you can be more community facing because the public businesses and households are the people who need the service?
[00:23:02.79] Niall: Yeah. Like for example, I was out in a company all hands out in Sligo, and I went for a swim in Rosses Point. Beautiful spot. But we recently diverted the water there. The wastewater from there to the main plant in Sligo, so cleaned up the beach there. And part of that there was a new sauna place, a new cafe. The whole community benefits from something like that. So there isn't. It's not just individual customers. The actual entire community can benefit from a new wastewater treatment plant or whatever, and we have to remember that all the time. It's not just the direct users.
[00:23:31.86] Richard: Just talking about wastewater there has been a lot of publicity around wastewater issues in Dublin, and whether Dublin Bay and swimming in the sea is is safe, and we've seen the problems that they have in places like London with very, very old water infrastructure and problems they've had with the River Thames and so forth. Yeah. Are we facing a new reality about swimming in Dublin Bay, that it's a fact of life, that there will be times when people cannot or should not do it?
[00:23:57.94] Niall: Yeah, well, we've got this. It's a Victorian design, I suppose, but it's a very effective design. When the rain comes, you've got very heavy flows. So first of all, everything that's on the streets flows into the storm drains and that goes straight into the rivers, out to the sea. So all the dog poo, everything that's on the street is going out there. So there's an element of pollution that Uisce Éireann doesn't control, just comes off the streets. But the other side, we have a lot of what's called combined sewers. So if you're in an older part of Dublin, the water that comes from the roof of your house goes into the same drain as the water from your toilet. It's a combined drain. So when you get very heavy rains, our sewers fill up with rainwater. If we don't do something about that, it will come up through the manholes. So what the Victorians designed was stormwater overflows. So essentially when the pipe reached a certain level, it overflows into another pipe and that just takes it out to the dodder, the Liffey, whatever it is, and then out to Dublin Bay.
[00:24:48.41] Niall: That's the challenge and that's what people are complaining about. Previously you had a 1 in 20 year storm. Now with climate change we're getting much heavier downpours and that is impacting how stormwater overflows work. We're seeing more of that happening. I think we've estimated to completely separate stormwater, and wastewater around the country would be in the region of 30 to 40 billion. So it's not something that's going to happen with too much other work to do. It's not going to happen in the short term. So what I would be saying to people is you can swim in Dublin Bay and I swim all year round in Dublin Bay myself. We think you're going to be able to swim in Dublin Bay after a very heavy rain. Don't swim for 24 hours. That's kind of the mantra we're going with. And we think you can probably swim in Dublin Bay, maybe not
365 days a year, but maybe 330 days a year. And if you live in a region where there's
1.5 million people living around a bay, that's not bad, you know.
[00:25:38.39] Richard: And the alternative to that, is to spend the 30 or 40 billion? That would be required to make that go away. That problem.
[00:25:45.65] Niall: And you still have the issue of the stuff that's on the streets flushing into the bay. Anyway. I don't know how you resolve that one. You know, you can talk to dog owners and all that kind of stuff, but, you know, but there is a challenge there. It is a condition of living in a big city, I think, you know.
[00:25:58.97] Richard: How's the relationship with local authorities? Because there's this ongoing connection where for so many years, people who were looking after the water were employees of the local authorities, and they have been changing over to Uisce Éireann. And that's an ongoing process.
[00:26:12.92] Niall: Yeah, so look, originally when the single utility was established, there was a lot of pushback, you know, people who'd been working in the local authority water service for years were doing a good job. I'm a strong believer in the national utility.
I think we deliver better services. We deliver a consistent standard across the country. We're able to go to government and say, here's what water needs. Like I said before, water was always the poor cousin in the local authorities because roads were required or whatever. We go in and we've got a very strong voice now with all government parties. I mean, we get good support from the opposition as well. Around our plans and our progress and our programs to deliver water service. So we're a much stronger voice for delivering water services across the country. So I think that has helped, which over time I think people have come more and more accustomed. We do have some sort of holdouts who kind of go, oh, it was better in the old days. But I think generally our people are seeing how much we've invested, how we've improved things and how we are getting stuff done, and especially we're getting the budget that we need to deliver stuff.
[00:27:08.13] Richard: On the question of the budget, you have a budget allocation, but I was reading how higher construction costs, higher maintenance costs, all kinds of materials prices have gone up. Do you still have the budget you need, or are you looking for more money from government?
[00:27:23.58] Niall: We're at the moment, we're in with the government discussing our strategic funding plan for the next five years. So between 25 and 29, that five year period, we have asked for a certain level of funding. We think we're going to get a little bit less than what we want, but there's some discussions in the media that we'll get more. So it's it's very much to play for at the moment.
[00:27:41.13] Richard: You're kind of pushing on an open door because one of the big concerns for government at the moment is getting more houses built?
[00:27:46.47] Niall: Yeah.
[00:27:47.10] Richard: And there is an issue that has been raised, and I want to ask you about it, is whether or not access to sites and having water and water infrastructure for sites, whether that's actually causing delays in getting the number of houses built. And if you can get the money to fix all of those things or make it happen more quickly, it would actually help with housing delivery.
[00:28:06.39] Niall: Yeah, certainly we need to keep investing and if we get more money, we can deliver more. It's simple enough. The only restriction is around the planning process. We can talk about that separately. But as far as funding is concerned and housing is concerned, we can definitely deliver. We offered I think around 40,000 unit connections last year. So we're keeping up with demand. My concern is going forward, we're using up a lot of reserve capacity that we have in the system, and we're not building out quickly enough ourselves and ESB connections. I think roughly we have capacity in the state to deliver about 30,000 homes a year. With the current infrastructure and the way we're set up to deliver, you know, with the consenting process, the planning process.
[00:28:46.15] Richard: And we may need 50,000?
[00:28:47.35] Niall: Well, that's what they're talking about. So I think we need to get together. All these entities need to get together. Sit down. Look at how we deliver 50,000 houses a year. Because right now we're using up that reserve capacity in infrastructure. But that's going to run out. We're going to run into trouble.
[00:29:01.12] Richard: The planning reform bill has been going through the House for some time. It still has to go through the Seanad. It's expected, I think that before the end of the year that would happen. Do you think from your perspective, what's in that bill? Is everything that you would need or require to improve the planning to the right level?
[00:29:18.40] Niall: There are definitely improvements in that planning bill, but it's not the be all and end all. It's not going to solve all the problems. I definitely think we need to give resources to the consenting processes like An Bord Pleanála need the staffing to go back to the Greater Dublin drainage project that's been going through the courts and An Bord Pleanála for, you know, for years. That really should take 12 months, you know, six months in An Bord Pleanála, six months in the courts. We very quickly can deal with stuff that's about resourcing dedicated resources.
[00:29:45.11] Richard: So it's not about legislation necessarily. It's a follow up that goes hand in hand.
[00:29:48.26] Niall: Yeah, and, you know, some of the legislation is trying to raise the bar about who can object and that kind of stuff. And yeah, that might be effective, but I think people will find their way around that. So there will always be objectors. We live in a democracy. You're entitled to do all that. But we need to get through those processes more quickly. And, you know, stuff that is spurious objections. You know, if you're objecting on environmental grounds, a lot of your costs are covered when you're an objector. If you're objecting to spurious stuff, maybe you pay for that yourself. And the real environmental stuff the state covers.
[00:30:17.39] Richard: Do you miss the hands on engineering?
[00:30:19.25] Niall: Yeah. There are times when you're kind of, you know, dealing with a problem and you're trying to get teams to work and you're dealing with lots of multiple stakeholders. You kind of go, God, I wish I was back in a power plant just fixing a few wires myself, you know but I do love the challenge of working with people and even dealing with all the stakeholders. Everybody really are just defending their own patch. And most people I work with are quite genuine, and even the more difficult people are working for their constituents or working for their people that they're representing, you know. So it's standing in their shoes and looking at stuff from their point of view helps when you're trying to resolve those issues.
[00:30:50.98] Richard: What was the biggest lesson you learned from all of those years working as an engineer that you've brought into the leadership role in a company like Uisce Éireann?
[00:31:00.19] Niall: I think it was like I was saying before, you get promoted especially in technical roles, because you're a perfectionist and because you deliver excellence, you know. But I think excellence can be the enemy of the good. Sometimes 90% is good enough to get you moving. Not that the bridge will fall down, but maybe, you know, it might be a little bit slower, a little bit delivered a few days later, but that might be a necessary compromise, you know what I mean? So it's learning to compromise. Where can you compromise? You know, that kind of stuff. How can you get a team to work together and pull together? Because you always have ambiguity. You don't have all the facts when you're in management and managing people, and you have to just plow on and make decisions
[00:31:37.63] Richard: And make decisions in the face of it. Absolutely. There are some questions that I ask all of our guests on this podcast. Niall, if you could call it the quickfire round and I'll throw them at you now, the first one, what leader do you most admire and why?
[00:31:49.26] Niall: Yeah, it's funny because I've been thinking about this and I do remember when I worked for General Electric, I worked for Jack Welch, who's a lot of his ideas were. .
[00:31:57.30] Richard: Neutron Jack!
[00:31:57.69] Niall: Neutron Jack. We admired him at the time. A lot of his ideas, I think, are a little bit outdated now. The world has changed. We've moved on. And, you know, he would have fired 10% of his staff every year. The underperformers. I mean, that's just not the way to work nowadays, you know what I mean? I think you can motivate people and deal with people and people who aren't performing. Nobody gets up in the morning and says they don't want to work. They just tend to be in the wrong roles or whatever. So I think you can work with people like that. So nowadays, look, I meet some really great people. I'm on the IBEC National Council. There's some fantastic leaders in there, some really good people. So I just take bits and pieces from various people like Steve Jobs. Really great entrepreneurial guy. Read his book. Not sure I'd like to work for him. You know, or I'd like to have worked for. I'd say it was a difficult boss, but, you know, you get inspiration from very different people.
[00:32:41.76] Richard: He got his results. Your favourite book or film?
[00:32:44.64] Niall: My kids give out to me because when I'm at home, if they are all gone out or whatever, I'm usually found watching some old war movie on YouTube or something. So I do like old black and white movies with a decent dialogue.
[00:32:54.69] Richard: The longest day!
[00:32:55.56] Niall: Yeah, all those kind of stuff versus the Marvel movies that are just crash, bang, wallop with no plot. You know, that kind of would do my head in and then books. I read loads of different types of books. I find the challenge nowadays is getting the focus on books. You know, I deleted TikTok recently because you can lose an hour just flicking through Instagram and watching videos. So it's a discipline I need to reinvigorate is in reading books because I read one recently, 'Still life' I think really good, nice, just nothing special. But it was a really nicely written book.
[00:33:21.99] Richard: You got a lot out of it?
[00:33:21.99] I enjoyed it, yeah.
[00:33:23.22] Richard: Do you have a mantra that guides you in how you do your job?
[00:33:27.48] Niall: I guess it's, you know, when you're looking at something and it goes back to this enemy is perfection of the good. Sometimes you get a document or a report and you kind of go, I wouldn't really have written it that way. But does it carry the message? Because I think it can be quite demoralizing for people who've written something that's reasonably good to get, you know, sent back or rewritten or changed a lot. So if it conveys the message, I tend to let it go through. Sometimes if it's not good enough, I will obviously send it back again. But with the way you write, something wouldn't necessarily be the only way to do something. You get these letters that are written by committee. Sometimes you know where everyone has a little bit of input and sometimes they just don't carry the message at all. So like I said, it sounds terrible, but 90% is maybe good enough. You know.
[00:34:08.80] Richard: Sometimes it has to be. Yeah, yeah. When you finish this job, what would you like people to say about what you achieved and how you did it?
[00:34:17.05] Niall: There's a couple of areas. One is that internationally people are looking at issues and a lot of water is run by municipalities, local councils all around. You know, the UK is probably slightly different, but outside, you know, France, a lot of European countries, their water systems are run by local councils and that. So a lot of them are looking to escape. And we had a delegation over from New Zealand recently because they're looking to replicate what we're doing, bringing them all together. So when we achieve what we want to achieve, I'd love that people you know, from an organisational view, look at that model and say, look how Uisce Éireann did it, and come over and see how we managed to do it. And then from another side is, I don't think people really respect and protect water the way they should in Ireland. And, you know, as we develop as a utility, as we get more out talking to people, and I'd love that people really value water and how precious it is, and we should treat it well and how much we have fantastic resource here. You know, it will be an advantage for us in the future, but how we need to protect it and use it wisely.
[00:35:12.12] Richard: And appreciate it. Biggest mistake or regret?
[00:35:14.82] Niall: I was thinking about that. I don't have many. You know, I have a great family. It's nice going home at night, talking with the kids and my wife. And so that's all great. No regrets there. Work wise, I have had a really interesting career and achieved a lot of good stuff and worked with great people over the time, so not much regret. Probably not getting to that Antonov with my Fiesta is probably the biggest regret. You know.
[00:35:34.98] Richard: The photographs alone would have been good if you'd survived.
Any advice you'd give to a person starting out in a leadership role?
[00:35:42.22] Niall: Barack Obama has a nice little video on this where he talks about how he likes the people who get stuff done. You know, so try and be the person who gets stuff done. Don't be the person who goes in and says, here's 100 reasons why we can't do something. Try and say, look, there's challenges here, but I think I can overcome them and do your best in that [ and take on those difficult jobs. That's one thing I did is take on the tricky roles, and I found it always paid off. You get recognised even if a project is difficult or not going great, you do get noticed for that. And like I said, be the person who gets done and I think you'll do well, you know.
[00:36:14.26] Richard: Well Niall, it's been a pleasure talking to you about your own career path, from problem solving around the world to transforming Ireland's water infrastructure at home. Niall Gleeson, CEO of Uisce Éireann, thank you very much for joining us.
[00:36:26.08] Richard: We hope you're enjoying this EY podcast CEO outlook series. Remember, you can catch previous interviews we've done with lots of other CEOs. Until the next time, thanks for listening. Bye bye.
[00:00:23.57] Niall: Yeah, I think it's no secret. There's been a huge lack of investment for the last, maybe 60 to 100 years in the water and wastewater infrastructure around the country. So since the inception of Uisce Éireann, in the last ten years, we've caught up a lot. But there's years of work to do, and we estimate somewhere around €60 billion worth of work to do to get the existing system up to standard. And that will take us 20, 30 years to get there.
[00:00:47.93] Richard: 60 billion?
[00:00:48.71] Niall: Yeah. It's an enormous figure. I mean, if you consider just keeping the existing system going is probably half a billion to three quarters of a billion a year just for capital maintenance of the existing works. And as we build new plant and equipment. You know, in 20 years time, that will all need to be refreshed. So this is just an ongoing investment in water and wastewater infrastructure that the country has to, you know, keep up with and keep delivering over the next decades.
[00:01:11.47] Richard: To some extent, that's because of maybe our own attitudes in Ireland towards water. There is this sense that we take it for granted, and that would have fed into many, many years of not doing the upgrades that were required. So there's a big catch up exercise.
[00:01:25.75] Niall: I think, you know, local authority water services, people have done a really good job of in a very limited budget of trying to keep things on the road. It has always been the poor cousin because, you know, opening a bypass or a new bridge is much easier on the political system than a wastewater treatment plant.
[00:01:43.39] Richard: Photographs of the new pipes under a road don't quite work as well as the photograph of the road.
[00:01:48.37] Niall: We actually bury a huge amount of our infrastructure. And like I opened something recently with Minister O'Brien and it was a €130 million project, vast catchments, you know, 40 meter down, 40 meter wide. Big underground pipes. But at the end of the day, what we opened was something that looked like a, you know, a small bungalow in the countryside, you know. So that was the above ground.
[00:02:07.75] Richard: And it isn't just a political thing. It's maybe a cultural thing as well, that because of our climate, because of our weather, we say, well, water's not a problem. We don't have a water problem, we have too much water. So therefore it's just brushed aside or has been in the past.
[00:02:22.24] Niall: I mean, I've been on radio shows where people have commented, you know, I'm standing here in the rain, it's lashing down and you're telling me you can't get it out of the taps? But there's a huge journey from getting rainwater, treating it, you know, purifying it, sterilizing it, and then getting it into the network and delivering it to your tap. That's a really complex journey and expensive journey. And people really don't have a concept of how difficult that is to achieve.
[00:02:43.66] Richard: The question of water and financing. It was a huge political issue around water charges a number of years ago. It fell the way it fell in the end. Do you think, though, that maybe because people feel that they don't pay for it, that they're more inclined to waste it, and they're more inclined to take it for granted.
[00:03:00.81] Niall: Yeah, I think that is true. I mean, people do take it for granted, but actually, water is relatively cheap, even in countries where they do pay for it. Even in those countries, I think they take it for granted and it is misused. But it's becoming a much more scarce resource. That's one of the challenges we're reaching. I mean, Dublin is struggling on the supplies it has at the moment. I do think it's an education thing and a learning thing and also, you know, some kind of incentive to conserve water.
[00:03:26.19] Richard: When you say Dublin is struggling, how immediate or serious an issue is that?
[00:03:30.84] Niall: For me, it's very serious. We want to build that pipeline from the Shannon and that has been talked about for the last maybe 30 years, you know, trying to get that water. The Liffey is a very small river really, in comparison to other rivers in the country, and it has a very small catchment. It's basically the Wicklow Hills, so it's quite vulnerable and it's going to become more vulnerable with climate change. So we really need to get another source into Dublin. I mean, for example, we recently did a big outage on the pipeline that runs from Ballymore Eustace, the big treatment plant up in Kildare down into Dublin, there's a 1.6m diameter pipe that brings nearly a third of the water for the city into town. That has leaks along it, and we fixed one of those leaks recently, but it was a 24 hour outage. We got it done on time, on schedule, but if that had gone to 36, 48 hours, people in Dublin would have started to run out of water. A third of the population.
[00:04:20.77] Richard: And the flip side of it is that the proposal to look at taking water from the Shannon will open up a whole lot of very strong views and emotive stuff that people have in that part of Ireland about maybe reducing water levels in the Shannon or water going from here to supply Dublin. And I don't live in Dublin and that's their problem over there.
[00:04:42.40] Niall: Yeah. Well first of all, look, the impact on the Shannon is going to be negligible. At the most we'll take, is about 3% of the flow in the water. And it'll be right down the bottom of the Parteen basin, just almost at Limerick city and 20km further it's into the estuary, into the sea. So really the impact on the Shannon is going to be minimal. I do understand people will see this big investment in their county that has no benefit to their county. It just, you know, it'll go up to Dublin. That's the way they see it. But actually the pipeline will feed towns and villages all the way up through the Midlands with the likes of Tullamore and Mullingar and these kind of places. So there would be.
[00:05:13.97] Richard: Benefits along the way as well.
[00:05:15.23] Niall: About a third of the water will be distributed along the route and then the final two thirds are in Dublin.
[00:05:19.70] Richard: What's the status of that project now, Niall?
[00:05:22.04] Niall: We've just got permission to go for planning. There's a public procurement process, the public spending code. So we've had what they call AG1, which is approval to go ahead and go for planning. Towards the end of next year. We will go for planning and hopefully that will get through. But we all know there's challenges around the planning process. We have one project called the Greater Dublin Drainage Project, a wastewater treatment plant up in Dunshaugh. We got permission for that back in 2019. It got challenged. It has been bouncing around the courts, an Bord Pleanála, still with an Bord Pleanála at the moment. So that would be my fear for this water supply project that had left similar challenges.
[00:05:56.61] Richard: Take a very long time. What about leaks? I mean, how many kilometers of pipeline do we have in the water system in Ireland, and how much are we losing?
[00:06:04.23] Niall: Yeah, so we've got about 64,000km of mains drinking water network, which is a huge network. It's not, you know, for the size of the country. Our spatial planning has never been greater. We have a lot of small settlements, quite dispersed population. So it's a rather inefficient system. Ideally you'd have a replacement rate of 1%, so 600km a year, but that would cost us our entire budget would be spent on just replacing pipes. So we do a very targeted programme of fixing leaks where they are. And then we do fix sections of pipes where the pipes are particularly old or troublesome. Right now, when we took over, the leakage rate in the country was in the region of 48 to 50%. We have it down to around 31% in Dublin now, and I think it's about 36, 37% for the rest of the country. So we are making progress. The challenge I've asked my team to deliver is in Dublin to be below 20% by the time the water supply project from the Shannon is running, so that's still a lot of leaks. But for an age-old system like Dublin's Victorian system, that's not a bad program, and I think we need new technologies. If we try to fix all the leaks in Dublin city, the roads would be dug up and the traffic situation would be crazy. It would make Luas cross City look like, you know, a weekend work. So we really have to target that. So we need new technologies to fix leaks when we get to below 20%.
[00:07:21.50] Richard: And are they there?
[00:07:22.46] Niall: There are technologies being developed and there are, you know, people running plastic inserts inside pipes and that kind of stuff. So those things do exist, but they need to be more sophisticated than they are to get. So.
[00:07:32.66] Richard: And if for some reason the Shannon solution doesn't happen, is there a plan B?
[00:07:39.41] Niall: We have some interim short term solutions, but a lot of them rely on their 4 or 5 years. It would you know, we'd be asking can we over abstract from the Liffey for a temporary period, assuming that the Shannon is coming in? If it doesn't happen, we're just going to run out of growth. We're not going to run out of water. You know, you and I, sitting at home won't run out of water in our taps. But we'll be saying no to future development. And no more houses, no more foreign direct investment, no more indigenous industry for the Dublin area. And further out, like the one big advantage of the Shannon project is it's going to allow us push water that is currently coming into Dublin. I say up north into Louth and Dundalk and down south into Wicklow and Wexford. So we will open up opportunities for those areas to grow as well with this whole supply. So we estimate that about 50% of the population will benefit from the Shannon. There is no plan B really. We need that water and countries looking at us. When we've talked to them about desalination, they're going. So you've got this big river over here and you're talking to us about taking water from the sea. Are you mad? You know, it's just that's your solution, you know?
[00:08:37.08] Richard: So it's something that, uh, (A) has to happen from what you're saying. And also will have benefits outside of Dublin.
[00:08:43.41] Niall: Yeah.
[00:08:44.28] Richard: Now we've talked about the scale of the issues, some of the challenges and the priorities that you have in Uisce Éireann. But I want to talk a bit about yourself, your own background, how you came to this point in your career, and we're going to do that just after this. So, Niall, you're an engineer by training. What attracted you to engineering?
[00:09:08.41] Niall: Yeah it's funny. My father, who's passed away, he was not an engineer. He was probably the furthest away from an engineer who's more academic, more languages, that kind of stuff. But my grandfather, you know, got involved in television when it was coming out. He was a ham radio expert, so I love spending time with him and talking to him. He passed away when I was about 12 or 13. He was a huge influence on me, though. So you have.
[00:09:28.96] Richard: Very strong memories of talking to him about stuff like that?
[00:09:31.84] Richard: Tinkering with radios with him and trying to set up my own ham radio. I don't think I was that successful, but yeah.
[00:09:36.58] Richard: Were you more of a take things apart than take them apart and try and put them back together?
[00:09:41.17] Niall: I wasn't as good at putting it back together as I was, you know. I'd taken them apart. So lots of bits lying around the garage that, you know, people were hoping I would someday repair, you know.
[00:09:48.97] Richard: So you were a bit of a fixer problem solver, were you?
[00:09:52.87] Niall: Yeah, I liked to, you know, do stuff. And I did a bit of DIY around the house, buying tools and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it was, I got into it early and I like all that kind of tinkering with stuff. And the draw of engineering was strong. I kind of wanted to be an engineer from the age of 13, and, you know, it.
[00:10:09.74] Richard: Was always going to be engineering for you.
[00:10:11.18] Niall: Yeah.
[00:10:11.42] Richard: So you went to college. You went to Bolton Street. What kind of engineering did you study?
[00:10:14.72] Niall: I did mechanical. Mechanical engineering.
[00:10:16.61] Richard: Did you like it?
[00:10:17.30] Niall: Yeah. I mean, look, engineering is actually a tough degree. It's, you know, you talk to some people doing commerce or arts or whatever, and they're in a few classes a week. Engineering is sort of a 40 hour a week course and tough enough degree to get through but some days, I remember having much fun in my third year and not doing so well in exams.
[00:10:34.82] Richard: Distractions Niall!
[00:10:35.51] Niall: Yeah. So but we all go through those phases, those challenges. But yeah, it was a good degree and I've enjoyed the jobs I've got since you know.
[00:10:42.77] Richard: And one of those jobs was when you joined GE that came about through a training program.
[00:10:47.84] Niall: Yeah, so back in the day when Ireland was a cheap place and wages were low. General Electric used to come over from the states and hire about 15 to 20 Irish engineers a year to go and install gas turbines, power plants all around the world. So you went off to Schenectady in New York, got trained there for six months, and then another six months, sort of on the job around the states, you know, worked in places like Memphis and New Johnsonville, Tennessee. So I know a lot of these towns where some have maybe Donald Trumps and JD Vance supporters come from, you know, interesting places.
[00:11:18.48] Richard: You were under the bonnet of the Rust Belt.
[00:11:20.58] Niall: Yeah, yeah, trailer parks and all that kind of stuff.
[00:11:23.10] Richard: And you traveled a lot with General Electric. You went to, like, Asia. You went all around the place.
[00:11:28.02] Niall: Yeah, yeah, I did jobs in Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand. So, yeah, really exciting at a time when not a lot of people were traveling to that level. Now, my daughter just came back from touring Southeast Asia, and it's like going to the south of Spain nowadays, you know what I mean? But in those days, very few people traveled to those places, and there weren't that many tourists either. You know, you were off the beaten track a bit.
[00:11:49.56] Richard: Was it tough to do engineering projects in those places, you would have had language barriers, cultural barriers, all kinds of things.
[00:11:57.65] Niall: Yeah it was, it was difficult. And you tended to be a lot more hands on than you would be in Ireland. Say you were in Ireland, you would have had engineers, you would have been technicians and mechanics and all that kind of stuff. A lot of the time in these places, the local guys weren't that well trained. So you'd have to do a lot of the physical work yourself, like rewiring junction boxes and helping them. But it was great training these guys. They really wanted to learn and they were enthusiastic. And, you know, even with broken English, when you're talking engineering, people can tend to understand you're looking at the same drawing. You'll understand the program flow and all that kind of stuff.
[00:12:26.60] And what kind of projects were you doing?
[00:12:28.67] Niall: Mostly it was either new power plants. So, you know, you'd be going into places where people didn't have electricity or had unreliable electricity, putting in brand new power plants. So it was good work. You know, they were being driven off gas, so carbon. This is 30 years ago. So we didn't know about the impacts. But you know, we were bringing electricity to people that didn't have it or upgrading electricity so.
[00:12:47.60] Richard: And of those different countries you lived in for a while and worked in, what was your favorite?
[00:12:52.17] Niall: It's hard to judge. Myself and my wife lived in Indonesia, in Jakarta for a year, and that was just so different from Ireland. I mean, there was 12 million people. There was open sewers on the streets, great atmosphere and loads to do. And it was, everything was exciting, you know. For two young kids. We were probably in our late 20s. It was a great place to live and a really great experience.
[00:13:13.38] Richard: Over the years with all of those projects. I mean, inevitably you must have had setbacks and things that went wrong. Problems. Any particular ones that you recall?
[00:13:22.47] There was one and it was one where I, where I started, my first kind of leadership job was in the UK, where the project was tailing off, and I was asked to become lead TA technical advisor. So basically. But it was just to run down the project and tidy up the books and that kind of stuff. But the rotors on these big machines, they were 100 ton rotors. The machines were generating about 300MW, which is enough to supply a small town. They started to break, so the bolts that held the rotors together started to break, and they were snapping inside the machines, destroying the machines. So this went from a wind down project to an enormous, like €1 billion at the end of it, of repairing these rotors at one stage, because the liquidated damages were, I think, a million a week when a million was worth something. We were flying rotors over to the states on Antonov aircraft to be.
[00:14:08.41] Richard: There's an awful lot at stake.
[00:14:09.79] Niall: Yeah, huge. And again, I was in my late 20s running, you know, crews of 100 people and flying, organising flights with Antonov and all this kind of stuff.
[00:14:17.86] Richard: Antonov's are these huge freight cargo planes!
[00:14:20.98] Niall: Yes, their the giant Russian planes, you know, they seem to land.
And it was funny when they landed. There's about six pilots, but there's about a crew of 12 who seem to get out and fix all the bits that broke while he was flying the last flight, you know? So yeah. Quite scary.
[00:14:33.28] Richard: You didn't take a lift home with them or anything?
[00:14:34.90] Niall: No. It was funny. When I was in the Kent airport, myself and my wife were watching this because a lot of people wanted to see it happening, and we were there with our little fiesta and the guy, they were refueling in Shannon because the fuel was duty free, and he did offer to fly us home with our car and to Shannon and I regretted not doing it, but at the time the project was in such chaos that I really couldn't have taken the 3 or 4 days off that it would have taken to get me back.
[00:14:58.40] Richard: And did you learn something about yourself in those situations where it gets stressful? How do you deal with pressure?
[00:15:06.44] Niall: I think having good people around you, I get stressed when I don't see a solution to a problem, even if the problem is big and I know there's a team on it that are going to get there. I'm less stressed around it. It's identifying the problem, getting the right people to sit on it and to deliver it. That's how you get over these problems. So I don't tend to get hugely stressed. And I think one of the early things I learnt in leadership is when people come in to talk to you, are they venting or do they want you to do something? Quite often managers jump in to do something and often they're just venting and people solve the problem as they're talking to you. Sometimes with a little bit of nudging, that skill is.
[00:15:40.10] Richard: But in order to have that, you need to know when to pull back or hold back and listen and let them do the talking.
[00:15:46.10] Niall: Yea, and it comes with experience, too. You know, when people are going to solve things and you know how to talk to people. I think people talk about active listening and all that nowadays, but it is important to not jump in with the solution straight away. I think it's to listen to people, listen how they talk. And actually as they talk themselves, they almost talk themselves through the problem quite often.
[00:16:04.56] Richard: But it's a real engineer's frame of mind. If you don't mind me saying Niall as well, that you have confidence and faith in a team to fix something, no matter how difficult it is, the engineer will always believe yes, if it's fixable, we're going to do it. The stress comes from the idea that there might not be a solution.
[00:16:22.35] Niall: Yeah, it's interesting because quite often with technical or financial people, there are lots of people who tell you 100 reasons why something can't be done. It's identifying the person who will give it a go is often the tricky thing. You know, with finance and engineering people, you tend to get promoted based on perfection. You know, if the balance sheet has to add up, the bridge can't fall down. So you have to be a good technical specialist. But when you get into management, you've got to let that go to some degree. You can't chase perfection all the time when you're dealing with people. You can't always get that delivered.
[00:16:52.64] Richard: That transition into management, what was that like for you? Were you comfortable with that? Was there a part of you that missed the more hands on go and fix it yourself?
[00:17:02.57] Niall: Yeah. I mean, I was a commissioning engineer, which is, you know, that's you're the prima donna at the end of a project, you come in and everyone has wired everything and built everything, and they're waiting for you to make the magic work, which is a great position and quite solitary in some ways. People rely on you, but you don't tend to rely on people. So going into management, it's a complete reverse of that. You're actually relying on people to do stuff for you. So that's a big transition. And again, this UK job I found my peers not turned on me, but became difficult because I was telling them what to do. And you'd go for pints in the evening and it would all be forgotten. That was a challenge trying to deal with, you know, people giving out and complaining and saying you're not doing the right job and all that kind of stuff, you know, in management. And that takes a bit of getting used to as well.
[00:17:43.82] Richard: And after that experience with General Electric around the world, you decided to come home. Why come home at that time?
[00:17:49.20] Niall: Yeah, well, as I said, my wife and myself were out in Jakarta for a year. Then we went to Finland and the UK. We spent time there, but we had our first child and you know, we went from running around the world with two holdalls each or something to now a 40 foot container of gear that you need when you have a child. And my jobs were short term-ish, so it wasn't going to be suitable for bringing up a child. So we didn't want Karen to live at home and me to travel. So we came back to Ireland and it was at the time when things were turning, you know, I left college in the mid 80s where the economy was crashing, but I came back to the late 90s and, you know, Ireland was really picking up. There was a lot of stuff going on.
[00:18:25.77] Richard: And there were different projects and different companies you worked with when you came home. One of them, am I right, Shanagher Engineering? [00:18:31.47] Niall: Yeah so I came back. I worked for Diageo for a very short term in the storehouse and that for a while. And then Shanagher Engineering contacted me and they were in this sort of international energy business, but based in Dublin. It was a great fit.
[00:18:45.15] Richard: And that was a company that was growing at that time.
[00:18:47.04] Niall: Yeah, when I joined, they had about 40 people in the field. So it was about providing field engineers at that time. When I left about eight years later, we had about 400 people in the field. So it was a family company, a family business, and they were transitioning from being the family business to being, you know, an organized, process driven business. And that was really interesting to be part of that sort of entrepreneurial type of thing. When you'd come from a very structured multinational like General Electric, you know.
[00:19:12.01] Richard: So what was it like then going in as CEO of Uisce Éireann. First of all, into the public sector rather than the private sector? Was that very different?
[00:19:20.05] Niall: Yeah, it is different now. I had worked for some of the big international companies, like I'd been with Alstom and we'd sold power plants into ESB, we had sold the Luas trams into the RPA. So I've been used to dealing with the public sector and knowing what levers work and what doesn't, and what the drivers are in the public sector. So it wasn't totally blown away with it. But it is different in the public sector and how they approach things. I mean, I spent all my life chasing gross margins, EBITDA, all that kind of stuff, and when you get into the public sector, nobody mentions that anymore. Now you're chasing cost control and you're managing expenses. And so don't you know we're not wasting money all the time. It's not striving for profit anymore, which is quite a different way of looking at things.
[00:19:58.01] Richard: From the outside there's often a perception between the private and the public that things move more slowly in the public sector, when you're actually inside the public sector, that isn't necessarily the case. It depends on what you do. What has to be done?
[00:20:12.08] Niall: Yeah. And there are restrictions and there are processes that you have to follow. And they tend to be a little bit more complicated in the public versus private. One of the big differences I've noticed is in the private sector, when you take on something new, you stop doing something that you used to do. So, you know, for example, you know, in the private sector, I had a business that wasn't making money and I shut it down and some customers rang me up and complained. But I just explained to them, look, it wasn't worth my while keeping delivering that service. So I had to shut it down. In the public sector, when you take on something new, it can be very difficult to stop what you're doing and to shut something down because you still have to provide that service. People expect it. So that's a real challenge. And it leads to inefficiencies. They're very hard to stop those inefficiencies because people expect from public services, good services. And you can't be as ruthless as you can be in the private sector.
[00:21:00.35] Richard: So it means then that a role can get bigger and bigger, and there can be greater draws on your time and energy.
[00:21:05.21] Niall: Yeah. And, you know, say new European standards come in for drinking water standards. We just have to take those on and we have to comply with those standards, which means upgrading the plants. The staff have to be retrained.
[00:21:16.01] Richard: You can't just say no!
[00:21:17.00] Niall: And you test more. So all that adds expense. But there's nothing on the other side that I can drop off and say, you know, we won't do this anymore, you know? So that's a challenge.
[00:21:25.13] Richard: The other thing about the public sector is that there are more stakeholders. It often feels more complex than the private sector. There's something a bit more straightforward about the private sector.
[00:21:37.40] Niall: Yeah. Well, like I said, if I go back to that example, I could ring those customers. And I said, look, we're just not delivering that service anymore. But there were other providers out there who could. Some of them weren't happy with it, but that was just a commercial decision, a business decision. And you've got to be tougher on that. With the number of stakeholders you have in the public sector, you don't have that luxury. You quite often, you just can't stop providing the service. If you do, you'll get various people pulling in. You can have political interference and you can have, you know, you can get a phone call from somebody to say, look, I know you want to do that, but you're not going to do it because the government doesn't want you to do that, you know? So there are challenges around that area, you know.
[00:22:12.71] Richard: How do you feel about the fact that the company, which is at its core, an engineering company, because it's about engineering, it's about providing water, wastewater, clean water, drinking water, the infrastructure that's required for that. And it all works. But because it affects so many people, you could very easily be very much in the public eye.
[00:22:33.17] Niall: We are an engineering driven company, but we want to become more customer, more community focused. That is kind of one of our mantras. Our vision is to deliver for communities and that requires a certain change within the organization as well. You know, when the answer on paper says we can't connect that housing estate or that business, then we need to look at it again to see is there another way to work around it? Is there more creative solutions? We are doing more and more of that.
[00:22:56.70] Richard: So you can be more community facing because the public businesses and households are the people who need the service?
[00:23:02.79] Niall: Yeah. Like for example, I was out in a company all hands out in Sligo, and I went for a swim in Rosses Point. Beautiful spot. But we recently diverted the water there. The wastewater from there to the main plant in Sligo, so cleaned up the beach there. And part of that there was a new sauna place, a new cafe. The whole community benefits from something like that. So there isn't. It's not just individual customers. The actual entire community can benefit from a new wastewater treatment plant or whatever, and we have to remember that all the time. It's not just the direct users.
[00:23:31.86] Richard: Just talking about wastewater there has been a lot of publicity around wastewater issues in Dublin, and whether Dublin Bay and swimming in the sea is is safe, and we've seen the problems that they have in places like London with very, very old water infrastructure and problems they've had with the River Thames and so forth. Yeah. Are we facing a new reality about swimming in Dublin Bay, that it's a fact of life, that there will be times when people cannot or should not do it?
[00:23:57.94] Niall: Yeah, well, we've got this. It's a Victorian design, I suppose, but it's a very effective design. When the rain comes, you've got very heavy flows. So first of all, everything that's on the streets flows into the storm drains and that goes straight into the rivers, out to the sea. So all the dog poo, everything that's on the street is going out there. So there's an element of pollution that Uisce Éireann doesn't control, just comes off the streets. But the other side, we have a lot of what's called combined sewers. So if you're in an older part of Dublin, the water that comes from the roof of your house goes into the same drain as the water from your toilet. It's a combined drain. So when you get very heavy rains, our sewers fill up with rainwater. If we don't do something about that, it will come up through the manholes. So what the Victorians designed was stormwater overflows. So essentially when the pipe reached a certain level, it overflows into another pipe and that just takes it out to the dodder, the Liffey, whatever it is, and then out to Dublin Bay.
[00:24:48.41] Niall: That's the challenge and that's what people are complaining about. Previously you had a 1 in 20 year storm. Now with climate change we're getting much heavier downpours and that is impacting how stormwater overflows work. We're seeing more of that happening. I think we've estimated to completely separate stormwater, and wastewater around the country would be in the region of 30 to 40 billion. So it's not something that's going to happen with too much other work to do. It's not going to happen in the short term. So what I would be saying to people is you can swim in Dublin Bay and I swim all year round in Dublin Bay myself. We think you're going to be able to swim in Dublin Bay after a very heavy rain. Don't swim for 24 hours. That's kind of the mantra we're going with. And we think you can probably swim in Dublin Bay, maybe not
365 days a year, but maybe 330 days a year. And if you live in a region where there's
1.5 million people living around a bay, that's not bad, you know.
[00:25:38.39] Richard: And the alternative to that, is to spend the 30 or 40 billion? That would be required to make that go away. That problem.
[00:25:45.65] Niall: And you still have the issue of the stuff that's on the streets flushing into the bay. Anyway. I don't know how you resolve that one. You know, you can talk to dog owners and all that kind of stuff, but, you know, but there is a challenge there. It is a condition of living in a big city, I think, you know.
[00:25:58.97] Richard: How's the relationship with local authorities? Because there's this ongoing connection where for so many years, people who were looking after the water were employees of the local authorities, and they have been changing over to Uisce Éireann. And that's an ongoing process.
[00:26:12.92] Niall: Yeah, so look, originally when the single utility was established, there was a lot of pushback, you know, people who'd been working in the local authority water service for years were doing a good job. I'm a strong believer in the national utility.
I think we deliver better services. We deliver a consistent standard across the country. We're able to go to government and say, here's what water needs. Like I said before, water was always the poor cousin in the local authorities because roads were required or whatever. We go in and we've got a very strong voice now with all government parties. I mean, we get good support from the opposition as well. Around our plans and our progress and our programs to deliver water service. So we're a much stronger voice for delivering water services across the country. So I think that has helped, which over time I think people have come more and more accustomed. We do have some sort of holdouts who kind of go, oh, it was better in the old days. But I think generally our people are seeing how much we've invested, how we've improved things and how we are getting stuff done, and especially we're getting the budget that we need to deliver stuff.
[00:27:08.13] Richard: On the question of the budget, you have a budget allocation, but I was reading how higher construction costs, higher maintenance costs, all kinds of materials prices have gone up. Do you still have the budget you need, or are you looking for more money from government?
[00:27:23.58] Niall: We're at the moment, we're in with the government discussing our strategic funding plan for the next five years. So between 25 and 29, that five year period, we have asked for a certain level of funding. We think we're going to get a little bit less than what we want, but there's some discussions in the media that we'll get more. So it's it's very much to play for at the moment.
[00:27:41.13] Richard: You're kind of pushing on an open door because one of the big concerns for government at the moment is getting more houses built?
[00:27:46.47] Niall: Yeah.
[00:27:47.10] Richard: And there is an issue that has been raised, and I want to ask you about it, is whether or not access to sites and having water and water infrastructure for sites, whether that's actually causing delays in getting the number of houses built. And if you can get the money to fix all of those things or make it happen more quickly, it would actually help with housing delivery.
[00:28:06.39] Niall: Yeah, certainly we need to keep investing and if we get more money, we can deliver more. It's simple enough. The only restriction is around the planning process. We can talk about that separately. But as far as funding is concerned and housing is concerned, we can definitely deliver. We offered I think around 40,000 unit connections last year. So we're keeping up with demand. My concern is going forward, we're using up a lot of reserve capacity that we have in the system, and we're not building out quickly enough ourselves and ESB connections. I think roughly we have capacity in the state to deliver about 30,000 homes a year. With the current infrastructure and the way we're set up to deliver, you know, with the consenting process, the planning process.
[00:28:46.15] Richard: And we may need 50,000?
[00:28:47.35] Niall: Well, that's what they're talking about. So I think we need to get together. All these entities need to get together. Sit down. Look at how we deliver 50,000 houses a year. Because right now we're using up that reserve capacity in infrastructure. But that's going to run out. We're going to run into trouble.
[00:29:01.12] Richard: The planning reform bill has been going through the House for some time. It still has to go through the Seanad. It's expected, I think that before the end of the year that would happen. Do you think from your perspective, what's in that bill? Is everything that you would need or require to improve the planning to the right level?
[00:29:18.40] Niall: There are definitely improvements in that planning bill, but it's not the be all and end all. It's not going to solve all the problems. I definitely think we need to give resources to the consenting processes like An Bord Pleanála need the staffing to go back to the Greater Dublin drainage project that's been going through the courts and An Bord Pleanála for, you know, for years. That really should take 12 months, you know, six months in An Bord Pleanála, six months in the courts. We very quickly can deal with stuff that's about resourcing dedicated resources.
[00:29:45.11] Richard: So it's not about legislation necessarily. It's a follow up that goes hand in hand.
[00:29:48.26] Niall: Yeah, and, you know, some of the legislation is trying to raise the bar about who can object and that kind of stuff. And yeah, that might be effective, but I think people will find their way around that. So there will always be objectors. We live in a democracy. You're entitled to do all that. But we need to get through those processes more quickly. And, you know, stuff that is spurious objections. You know, if you're objecting on environmental grounds, a lot of your costs are covered when you're an objector. If you're objecting to spurious stuff, maybe you pay for that yourself. And the real environmental stuff the state covers.
[00:30:17.39] Richard: Do you miss the hands on engineering?
[00:30:19.25] Niall: Yeah. There are times when you're kind of, you know, dealing with a problem and you're trying to get teams to work and you're dealing with lots of multiple stakeholders. You kind of go, God, I wish I was back in a power plant just fixing a few wires myself, you know but I do love the challenge of working with people and even dealing with all the stakeholders. Everybody really are just defending their own patch. And most people I work with are quite genuine, and even the more difficult people are working for their constituents or working for their people that they're representing, you know. So it's standing in their shoes and looking at stuff from their point of view helps when you're trying to resolve those issues.
[00:30:50.98] Richard: What was the biggest lesson you learned from all of those years working as an engineer that you've brought into the leadership role in a company like Uisce Éireann?
[00:31:00.19] Niall: I think it was like I was saying before, you get promoted especially in technical roles, because you're a perfectionist and because you deliver excellence, you know. But I think excellence can be the enemy of the good. Sometimes 90% is good enough to get you moving. Not that the bridge will fall down, but maybe, you know, it might be a little bit slower, a little bit delivered a few days later, but that might be a necessary compromise, you know what I mean? So it's learning to compromise. Where can you compromise? You know, that kind of stuff. How can you get a team to work together and pull together? Because you always have ambiguity. You don't have all the facts when you're in management and managing people, and you have to just plow on and make decisions
[00:31:37.63] Richard: And make decisions in the face of it. Absolutely. There are some questions that I ask all of our guests on this podcast. Niall, if you could call it the quickfire round and I'll throw them at you now, the first one, what leader do you most admire and why?
[00:31:49.26] Niall: Yeah, it's funny because I've been thinking about this and I do remember when I worked for General Electric, I worked for Jack Welch, who's a lot of his ideas were. .
[00:31:57.30] Richard: Neutron Jack!
[00:31:57.69] Niall: Neutron Jack. We admired him at the time. A lot of his ideas, I think, are a little bit outdated now. The world has changed. We've moved on. And, you know, he would have fired 10% of his staff every year. The underperformers. I mean, that's just not the way to work nowadays, you know what I mean? I think you can motivate people and deal with people and people who aren't performing. Nobody gets up in the morning and says they don't want to work. They just tend to be in the wrong roles or whatever. So I think you can work with people like that. So nowadays, look, I meet some really great people. I'm on the IBEC National Council. There's some fantastic leaders in there, some really good people. So I just take bits and pieces from various people like Steve Jobs. Really great entrepreneurial guy. Read his book. Not sure I'd like to work for him. You know, or I'd like to have worked for. I'd say it was a difficult boss, but, you know, you get inspiration from very different people.
[00:32:41.76] Richard: He got his results. Your favourite book or film?
[00:32:44.64] Niall: My kids give out to me because when I'm at home, if they are all gone out or whatever, I'm usually found watching some old war movie on YouTube or something. So I do like old black and white movies with a decent dialogue.
[00:32:54.69] Richard: The longest day!
[00:32:55.56] Niall: Yeah, all those kind of stuff versus the Marvel movies that are just crash, bang, wallop with no plot. You know, that kind of would do my head in and then books. I read loads of different types of books. I find the challenge nowadays is getting the focus on books. You know, I deleted TikTok recently because you can lose an hour just flicking through Instagram and watching videos. So it's a discipline I need to reinvigorate is in reading books because I read one recently, 'Still life' I think really good, nice, just nothing special. But it was a really nicely written book.
[00:33:21.99] Richard: You got a lot out of it?
[00:33:21.99] I enjoyed it, yeah.
[00:33:23.22] Richard: Do you have a mantra that guides you in how you do your job?
[00:33:27.48] Niall: I guess it's, you know, when you're looking at something and it goes back to this enemy is perfection of the good. Sometimes you get a document or a report and you kind of go, I wouldn't really have written it that way. But does it carry the message? Because I think it can be quite demoralizing for people who've written something that's reasonably good to get, you know, sent back or rewritten or changed a lot. So if it conveys the message, I tend to let it go through. Sometimes if it's not good enough, I will obviously send it back again. But with the way you write, something wouldn't necessarily be the only way to do something. You get these letters that are written by committee. Sometimes you know where everyone has a little bit of input and sometimes they just don't carry the message at all. So like I said, it sounds terrible, but 90% is maybe good enough. You know.
[00:34:08.80] Richard: Sometimes it has to be. Yeah, yeah. When you finish this job, what would you like people to say about what you achieved and how you did it?
[00:34:17.05] Niall: There's a couple of areas. One is that internationally people are looking at issues and a lot of water is run by municipalities, local councils all around. You know, the UK is probably slightly different, but outside, you know, France, a lot of European countries, their water systems are run by local councils and that. So a lot of them are looking to escape. And we had a delegation over from New Zealand recently because they're looking to replicate what we're doing, bringing them all together. So when we achieve what we want to achieve, I'd love that people you know, from an organisational view, look at that model and say, look how Uisce Éireann did it, and come over and see how we managed to do it. And then from another side is, I don't think people really respect and protect water the way they should in Ireland. And, you know, as we develop as a utility, as we get more out talking to people, and I'd love that people really value water and how precious it is, and we should treat it well and how much we have fantastic resource here. You know, it will be an advantage for us in the future, but how we need to protect it and use it wisely.
[00:35:12.12] Richard: And appreciate it. Biggest mistake or regret?
[00:35:14.82] Niall: I was thinking about that. I don't have many. You know, I have a great family. It's nice going home at night, talking with the kids and my wife. And so that's all great. No regrets there. Work wise, I have had a really interesting career and achieved a lot of good stuff and worked with great people over the time, so not much regret. Probably not getting to that Antonov with my Fiesta is probably the biggest regret. You know.
[00:35:34.98] Richard: The photographs alone would have been good if you'd survived.
Any advice you'd give to a person starting out in a leadership role?
[00:35:42.22] Niall: Barack Obama has a nice little video on this where he talks about how he likes the people who get stuff done. You know, so try and be the person who gets stuff done. Don't be the person who goes in and says, here's 100 reasons why we can't do something. Try and say, look, there's challenges here, but I think I can overcome them and do your best in that [ and take on those difficult jobs. That's one thing I did is take on the tricky roles, and I found it always paid off. You get recognised even if a project is difficult or not going great, you do get noticed for that. And like I said, be the person who gets done and I think you'll do well, you know.
[00:36:14.26] Richard: Well Niall, it's been a pleasure talking to you about your own career path, from problem solving around the world to transforming Ireland's water infrastructure at home. Niall Gleeson, CEO of Uisce Éireann, thank you very much for joining us.
[00:36:26.08] Richard: We hope you're enjoying this EY podcast CEO outlook series. Remember, you can catch previous interviews we've done with lots of other CEOs. Until the next time, thanks for listening. Bye bye.
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