Mr. John Tierney:

We have a hybrid funding model.

We are regulated but we are not fully self-sustaining like gas and electricity so we are still subject to a certain amount of Government subvention. We are a slightly hybrid model in terms of operation as well through the service level agreements. However, the Deputy endeavoured to potentially compare us to another agency. Given the manner in which we prepared for that, we would strongly argue that by putting in the systems we are putting in at the moment, it will give the organisation the foundation to be a high performance utility model. The critical point in spending this money up front is to save the Exchequer substantial moneys over the medium to long term as we have explained.

I refer to the culture within the organisation and performance in terms of the programme and the hours people are putting in working on the programme to stand up the business by 1 January, which was a hugely demanding deadline. The Deputy asked about the number of staff. We have 299 staff recruited and we expect to have between 500 and 510 by April or May of this year but the overall figure will not be finally decided until we are aware of the funds we will have available from 2015 as we move towards the regulated model because we have two different funding sources and that is still critically relevant to us.

The development contributions under the legislation will pass from the local authorities to Irish Water as part of the connection charging system. We are adopting the model in the first year within the local authorities from the point of view of the charging regime. It will then move into the fully regulated model and be an output from that.

With regard to the in-house expertise, we have tried to design the operation of the company to require little consultancy but there will still be an ongoing need to use companies under the capital programme regarding the design of schemes and so on because one can get that on a once-off basis depending on the scale of the scheme. One could not necessarily hire permanent staff to do the design of the schemes that might only be once off for ten or 20 years, for example, in terms of scale. Different factors come into play as part of a capital programme for which one would have to use expertise outside the organisation. That is part of the capital spending but, on the operational side, there would be little consultancy.