John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)
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I have a few comments, and I thank our guests for their comprehensive documents today, and their presentations. Ms Graham in her opening statement mentioned the initial set up of Irish Water and how it was envisaged that the utility would be a public utility, a State body in public ownership. Some of the contributions seem to suggest that all the problems around this emerged out of nothing, or ex nihilo, as Mr. Ó Tuathail suggested. I am interested in what Ms Graham says was the original intention. It is worth briefly recapping on why we are here, and how it became so muddled and confused for people. It looked suspiciously like Irish Water was being prepared for privatisation through a whole series of actions. This was not something in people's imaginations, despite what the original motivation might have been. The Government at the time went against its own consultant's report in setting up Irish Water as a subsidiary of Bord Gáis. Parts of Bord Gáis were subsequently privatised and sold off. That gave rise to suspicions. It was given to Bord Gáis on the one hand because it was stated that Bord Gáis had the operational capacity to deal with it yet there was this necessity for huge sums of public money to be paid out to external consultants for Irish Water. Demonstrably, Bord Gáis did not have the capacity to deal with all the aspects of it. There was the speed with which it was set up.