Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The information supplied about the public private partnership contracts transferred to Irish Water is incomplete and does not provide the information the Secretary General was in a position to provide and that he was asked to provide on the day. On page 5 of the letter there is a mechanism to deal with him. The chart deals with the extent of the design, build and operate contracts in the water services sector for February 2015. It gives a cost of €123,045,700 for those contracts and breaks down the number of contracts, sites and how many are wastewater treatment and how many are water treatment contracts.

I asked all day for the total liability for the contracts. The Secretary General is giving us the annual operating cost for 2015. These are 20 year contracts. In his letter he writes that it is not possible to provide a breakdown on a contract basis as the information in regard to the payments under individual contracts is commercially sensitive. I had specifically asked that the information be provided to us even on a local authority basis to avoid that kind of problem. The Secretary General could have been more helpful. He was well able to give us the operating cost based on the 115 contracts in situ, broken down by region, the south, the east, the north west and the total. All I am asking for is the total cost of those 115 contracts. I do not need to know about the individual contracts for wastewater treatment plants in Ringsend, Portlaoise, Mullingar or Roscrea. He was able to give us the information year by year on a regional basis. I want the total liability on the same basis, urgently.

This dates from our meeting on 6 February. I want this within seven days or I want the Secretary General to return here next Thursday for 15 minutes to explain why it is not here. Seven weeks on we do not have the information we sought. He said on the day he did not have it but he has been able to produce the operating annual costs. I want to know the total liability in the format he has provided. I will not dictate the format. He has avoided the issue again.