Ms Cathy Mannion:

In our assessment, as Mr. McGowan said, we looked at the totality of the costs. The Deputy is right. We found the total operating costs were higher than for comparable companies. For example, we found that they were twice the UK average at a similar point in time. I am not comparing Irish Water now with UK systems which are 20 years under regulation. We found that the costs were 20% higher than Northern Ireland and 2.6 times that of Scotland. As Mr. McGowan said, we started putting in aggressive efficiency measures to start bringing the operating costs down towards a benchmark. It is up to Irish Water how it decides to get those costs savings.