Mr. Niall Gleeson:

I will take the last question first. We currently have quite a number of water and wastewater treatment plants that operate under design, build and operate, DBO, schemes, and they are operated by private entities. Irish Water's aim is to move those plants back into the organisation and to operate them with direct hire staff. Our main aim will be to recruit a direct workforce trained by Irish Water and held accountable by Irish Water. We are not aiming to bring in contractors to run services; we will use contractors to supplement. Where there are outages, where there are additional problems around leakage or where we have a plant issue that needs additional resources to fix a particular problem, we will use contractor resources. That is a good model. I agree we do not want lots of contractors in the plants. We want a dedicated workforce that is trained by us and overseen by us. That is the way we intend to operate with regard to water and wastewater treatment plants going forward.

As far as the number of staff is concerned, we have not reduced the number since we took over. If vacancies have gone up, as I said previously, that is a problem of recruitment because people do not see a future in water services because of the current organisational structure.

The Senator might remind me of her second question.