Ms Cathy Mannion:

I may as well cover the last question as well, in that there is one further important difference between water and gas and electricity. In the case of the latter, we have a legal basis for resolving disputes and for dealing with customer complaints. There was no legal basis in the water legislation for anyone to carry out that role. Consequently, we have decided, on an agreement basis with Irish Water and the EPA, to put in place a process whereby if a customer rings Irish Water, he or she can immediately approach either the CER or the EPA to the extent that the complaint is not dealt with properly within Irish Water. In short, we will put in place a harmonised approach between the three organisations to allow customers to have a single point of contact whenever they have a complaint. Clearly, in the next round of legislation, we will seek the legal basis to do this because it always is second best to do it on an agreement basis, rather than having the legal rights.
As for our engagement with Irish Water to date, we have been working closely with the company for up to 18 months. It started out by just getting to know each other and working out a way of working together in order that Irish Water knew what were our goals and vice versa. The culmination of all this work will take place tomorrow, when Irish Water makes its full submission to us. As Mr. McGowan stated earlier, the last piece of work that had slowed up Irish Water was the need to conduct a market corporation test, which is very important because to get Irish Water off the Government's books, it must be fairly certain that it can pass this market corporation test. Consequently, it took a little more time to make sure that it got that right, probably rightly so from its point of view because we cannot get that one wrong.
As for holiday homes, no, we had not thought of having a different small standing charge. We are thinking of a single simple standing charge for all types of holiday homes because I suggest that in reality, the level of the charge, whatever it may be, will be much lower than the cost of providing the infrastructure to the property. It is more just an additional contribution that we want the second house to make towards its cost because it will be using very little water during the course of the year and otherwise might be paying too little in total for the water. The Deputy also mentioned payment options for energy.