Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)
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The questions I will ask are not necessarily those I thought I would ask coming to the meeting. What has become really clear and is incredibly worrying is that we have a Government Minister saying that this was not a decision of the Government but a decision of the regulator and we have the regulator saying that this was not a decision of the regulator but a decision of Government. That is really problematic if we have either a Government Minister or a regulator who do not know what their role is when it comes to setting tariffs.

I read the letter that went out from the Minister, Deputy Ryan, who was the Minister at the time. It states that while it was for the CER to determine the detail of how this should be implemented, in terms of the network tariff structures, the Government had agreed that savings of some €50 million should be passed on. That would appear to me to be a direction. The Minister finishes his letter by stating that he looked forward to hearing from the CER in the coming months on the implementation of network tariff rebalancing. The CRU does not seem to have the discretion not to implement this suggestion by Government.

I know this was ten years ago, there has been a shift since then and the Minister of State and others were not then in the positions they are in now. If this letter went out today, would the Minister of State see it as a direction from the Government or would it be at the discretion of the CRU to decide how it applied it? I would like to hear from the CRU whether it would see that letter as a direction. What does the legislation say? We need to know who is actually responsible here and it is incredible that we are an hour into this conversation and it is still not clear. This is an issue that first came into play ten, 12 or however many years ago.

That is my question. If this letter were to go out today, who would be responsible for making the decision and implementing it?