Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

The legislation around policy directions to regulators has changed since this letter was issued. I cannot remember the year but after this event EU legislation was introduced providing that energy regulators could not seek or take direction from any person, a minister or otherwise.

That has probably changed the legislative basis. Something like this now again would be a challenge for the Department to push or the Minister to put forward as a direction. I suppose at the same time the CRU operates within a policy framework that is set by the Government. In fact, it is set by the Oireachtas. While we are independent in making our individual decisions, I fully acknowledge that we took decisions every year on this basis, so we are not trying to step away from our responsibility here. We took decisions every year to continue implementing this. I suppose our view on it was that the policy decision, if one likes, on how to support large energy users was taken by the Government and we agreed to implement that. I hope that is clear and is not seen as walking away from anything. I think we would have engaged and that there is a note on file where we provided options for the Department on different ways that we could look at network tariffs in the context of the crisis we were in at the time. Rebalancing was not one of the options that we put forward but we were working with the Government to try to find ways forward in the context of the crisis. The Government took a policy choice on the particular measure and we agreed to implement that measure. I hope that is clear. We are genuinely not trying to create difficulty and walk away from our responsibilities in this regard.