Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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The regulator, the CER, will have to examine all the plans of Irish Water, which will have the collective wisdom of all the local authorities and their disparate proposals. All these will have to go to Irish Water and be examined. It will have to consider a capital programme, as Deputy Cowen rightly pointed out, and add to it what needs to be done in five or ten years or whatever. All of this will then go to the regulator which will calculate the sums on what exactly is allowable, as Deputy Cowen remarked. In the United Kingdom the regulator plans today for five years hence. I presume the regulator in Ireland will do exactly the same. There must be transparency about what the regulator does. It will have to publish its intention and allow people the opportunity to comment on it before a price is fixed. In other words, it will have to be transparent, accountable and open to full scrutiny and it will be. There is no intention of not getting everything done. Clearly we need to take into account the Shannon scheme, which has been referred to, and the timescale for it and how things fit into different financial frameworks. There is no issue about hiding any costs with this project.