Mr. Tony Keohane:

I thank the joint committee for giving me the opportunity to address it. I was appointed to the board of Ervia and nominated as chairman designate in July. I have a number of non-executive roles. I am a former chairman of Tesco Ireland and was its chief executive office from February 2006 until July 2013. I served as chairman of the board of Repak for three years and have been a board member of Trinity College Dublin and Bord Bia for over a year. I am on the board of Inner City Enterprise, a charity which supports unemployed persons in starting their own businesses. For the past three years I have been a member of the Labour Market Council which was set up under the Department of Social Protection to advise on implementation of the strategy Pathways to Work to tackle unemployment.

I was the chair of Efficient Consumer Response, ECR Ireland, for a number of years. ECR Ireland encourages long-term co-operation between trading partners to better serve the Irish consumer and remove costs from the supply chain. I am also chairman of Market Hub, a startup retail technology company and chairman of the Malone Engineering Group Ireland which focuses on the food and pharmaceutical sector. I run a business consultancy, Keohane Conaty, providing advice on strategic development to businesses. I am from Cork, live in Dublin and am married with three children.

Having spent many years in Tesco fulfilling customer requirements I hope to put the wide breadth of business skills and experience I have gained through my career in commercial, finance, decision-making, analysis and team building and my proven track record on delivering value to a business, to effective use, as chairman of Ervia. Ervia is a 100% State owned commercial and semi-State utility responsible for Ireland’s national gas, water and wastewater infrastructure and services. It delivers these services through two subsidiary companies, Gas Networks Ireland and Irish Water. Ervia is one of Ireland’s largest indigenous companies with 1,600 direct employees and a further 5,700 directly employed in partner organisations providing services to its 2.4 million gas and water customers. In 2015, Ervia contributed €1.8 billion to the Irish economy, €1.3 billion of which went directly to Irish suppliers.

As the parent company, Ervia has overall responsibility for the operation and performance of its subsidiary utility companies. It ensures that long-term strategies are in place for national gas and water services, that each business has a robust business plan in place and that they deliver against these plans. Ervia has overall responsibility for the funding of these utilities and ensuring appropriate financial facilities are in place to allow the utilities operate and deliver their capital investment programmes.

Gas Networks Ireland, GNI, is a long established infrastructure company that manages the national gas distribution network of 11,300 km and the transmission network of 2,400 km to safely deliver natural gas to homes and businesses in Ireland. The transmission system is linked to the UK and European gas markets through two undersea interconnector pipelines to Scotland. Natural gas is now available in over 160 population centres in 19 counties for 673,000 gas users in Ireland.

In January 2014 Irish Water took over responsibility for delivering and managing water services from 34 - now 31 - local authorities. This was done under service level agreements with local authorities, ensuring drinking water and wastewater services continued to be delivered to businesses and the public, while the utility was established and Irish Water began to take over full responsibility for the operation of the systems and implementation of the capital investment programmes. Irish Water is a very new public utility with responsibility for 60,000 km of water pipelines, 25,000 km of sewers, 900 water treatment plants and 1,000 wastewater treatment plants. It serves 3.3 million people, produces 1.7 billion litres of drinking water and treats 1.4 billion litres of wastewater every day. Current estimates are that an investment of €13 billion is needed to bring Ireland’s public water services to an acceptable standard. This will require a multi-annual multi-billion euro investment programme and is one of the largest national transformation programmes ever undertaken by the State.

The Ervia board operates under the code of practice for the governance of State bodies which sets out its key responsibilities. Our role is to ensure the proper governance and oversight of the operations of Ervia and its companies and to hold the CEO and senior executives to account in delivering the objectives set by the shareholder. The board’s responsibilities include guiding the strategic direction of the company, ensuring risks are managed appropriately, approving annual budgets and business plans, approving large capital projects, and major investment decisions and setting and monitoring performance objectives. As chairman of Ervia I will be responsible for leading the board and ensuring its effectiveness.

I am aware this is a challenging role and I am committed to bringing my skills and experience and the necessary time to meet that challenge. I look forward to working with the board, the executive and the staff of Ervia, the shareholders and all stakeholders to continue to build trust and confidence and to ensure the board does its job effectively to deliver on the business objectives that have been set for the company.