Councillor John Sheehan:

I am in favour of and agree with the setting up of the utility company, Irish Water, because a public private partnership model is needed to provide the infrastructure on which the Deputy has spoken. My comments were in regard to the provision of the price of it. That is what we did with the ESB. It is the aspect I was trying to hone in on, that we wouldn't lose the grasp of that again.

Someone else may wish to comment on the remainder.

Senator Burke raised the matter of education. Our universities are doing Trojan work for us. We have great graduates and so on but there is a cohort in society that has dropped out of school early and their parents dropped out of school early as well. We need to formulate a plan for people in socially deprived areas. We need to bring the parent and child back to school together. We should remember that the parent is probably only late teens or early 20s when the child is starting to go to school. We need to look at it in that shape to bring those people back into the system.