Mr. John Tierney:

I wish to address the second issue regarding clarification on the systems, although I cannot remember the exact question posed. I wish to give an analogy for the systems. If one imagines a major local authority area and one drives into it and finds it has no buildings and is only a car park. Setting up Irish Water is tantamount to that. We need premises, systems and processes for all of the things that we rely on every day in order to do our job, such as payroll, work management, customer services and so forth, as we have described here today. Then we need people, who must be trained in the particular processes we intend to implement, given that this is the first time we have had a water utility in Ireland. The enormity of that work has not been grasped fully. It is a huge piece of work to bring that about. It is an initial establishment cost that is necessary.

Members asked for comparisons with Wales and Scotland but it is very difficult to do that now because when those countries did it, they used slightly different models. The Welsh model has changed back from being a privatised model. What we tried to do in our report for the committee was to use benchmarkings in terms of some of the items we are talking about here and what they cost in other utilities. In terms of value for money, the regulatory environment is all about the protection of the customer and ensuring value for money in terms of what we do.