Mr. Kevin O'Donoghue:

There were a variety of questions and I will do my best to cover off all of them. If there are any I miss at the end, I would be happy to take them again. I can only apologise if I miss them as we are going through.

The model is complex. Deputy Stanley raised that and that is true. The role of the price monitoring group is to try to explain that to consumers. The market here was always complex but it was not widely understood. The price monitoring group has played a good role in trying to educate consumers. That is why the reports of the group are published online as well. That is why the Department's website has them - to try to let consumers see what is happening within the market.

The group is due to finish in June of this year. It is a matter for the Minister to determine whether that should be extended. In a situation where the idea of phasing out flat fees will run until October, there is probably merit in the price monitoring group continuing its work so that it would do a sweep in November, pick up the last of the charging structures from October and report in December, but that is a call for the Minister. I would be more than happy to take back the views of the committee to the Minister, if it felt that was of value.

Competition for the market certainly has been looked at previously. On the decision last year to set up the price monitoring group and to ask the CCPC to do a review of the waste market, the idea is that both of those would feed into any future decisions in relation to the market. The CCPC report is due mid-year. They are talking about that being done in July. At that point, we will have the report from the CCPC and a year's worth of reports from the price monitoring group, and it is then that future decisions on the market will be taken.

Deputy Stanley quite rightly stated that the brown bin is not available to all customers. The current regulation stipulates that it is for agglomerations of greater than 500 and the waste operators have to roll it out to anything greater than that. The Department would like to see that being reduced over time. Even the compost sector itself has concerns about a universal roll-out because one-off housing or difficult areas to reach within the country will push up the cost of the brown bin which is not what we are trying to do.