Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Ms Sayers for drawing attention in her opening statement to the lessons that can be learned from the supplier of last resort mechanism. It originates from an EU directive which was transposed into Irish law a decade and a half ago. It recognises that energy is a commodity upon which consumers depend. It could be argued that access to banking, cash or money to pay for that energy is also important. The parallel here is that there are customers out there who have not given authorisation to move their direct debit to Electric Ireland but they are moved anyway. They have been told that they will be moved if they do not do anything but they have not proactively done anything. They have not given Electric Ireland authorisation. Surely to God that is what we should be doing in the banking sector but that is a wider issue.

To go into the specifics, normally Electric Ireland would make 2,000 direct debit amendments per year for people who are changing their payment details. The company is now expecting to have 86,000 such amendments to make. What has the company done to ramp up capacity, particularly bearing in mind that there may be surge points as customers get closer to the cut-off point? What has Electric Ireland done and is the company confident that it will be able to deal with the scale of what is involved here?