Ms Sheenagh Rooney:

I will be brief. Senator Coffey asked how we developed it. Obviously, we have been regulating energy and gas supply companies. In 2014, we developed a customer handbook, which imposes 353 requirements on Irish Water. We monitor its compliance with those requirements. As a subset of that, we have identified nine customer charter areas as key requirements. One of them involves giving vulnerable or priority customers notice in advance of a planned outage or in the event of an unplanned outage. One would expect these key requirements to be in place. An automatic penalty is imposed on Irish Water if it breaches one of the nine basic customer commitments. We produced an information note with respect to that recently. Eighty-four charter payments were made throughout 2016. We monitor how Irish Water deals with complaints and publish information in that respect. All of this is in the public domain. We have an independent dispute mechanism to assist Irish Water customers who are not satisfied with the service they received or how they were dealt with. Irish Water accepts that the determination we make after we have looked at a complaint is final. This means that people who are not satisfied with Irish Water have somewhere to go. It is important to outline that the information in the documents we published when we looked at how Irish Water performed and what it achieved between 2014 and 2016 is in the public domain. We accept that more needs to be out there about it.