Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I wish to challenge some of the comments that are being made here about the profiteering of the company and how that is somehow immoral in the context of an energy crisis. Would the witnesses agree that the ESB as originally structured was an absolutely perfect model for a society because it did not have a for-profit mandate and it generated, ran and distributed the energy on what some would have perceived as a monopoly basis but it also worked efficiently for this country and returned a huge sum of money to the Exchequer because of its international operations and delivered the cheapest and most reliable energy, probably in the world?

Would the witnesses be in favour of returning to that sort of system, to removing the not-for-profit mandate of the company and returning us back to a nationalised energy system?