Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)

We will call it "McDowellism", which happily will come to an end in the next four or five months. Those people have always wanted to privatise the ESB, lock, stock and barrel. Week after week one can read in journals like the Sunday Business Post constant demands that it be privatised. Northern Ireland has had that experience with Viridian. As I understand it, Viridian controls the network and generation. That has also been the case elsewhere. Therefore, one could turn it around and look at it in a different way from the Minister and Deputy Ryan.

Powerful forces within the Minister's party, not the Progressive Democrats wing but the Progressive Democrats heart of Fianna Fáil will hopefully submerge into oblivion in three or four months' time. Hopefully, the Fianna Fáil members who feel the same way will go the same way and we will have a different Government. One could say that EirGrid was set up in response to Brussels as a pretence that we are embarking on a particular road. Nevertheless, the Minister will still privatise the main company itself and smash it up. I am opposed to this. It will have negative consequences in the future. Other jurisdictions, such as California and other American states and European countries, have felt those consequences.

I do not know whether Deputy Ryan reads the British financial press, but there was a striking article in the Financial Times on Monday asking whether Scottish electricity will ever be British-owned again. Scottish electricity is now coming under non-British control. There are five or six major electricity players in Britain but they are being taken out of British ownership. This is the kind of vista we should be rightly fearful of in the future.

The Minister need not think that he is a cutting edge, hard decision-making liberal. He is not. He is representing some quite dark forces within his own party who have a harsh agenda. The Taoiseach had to get the former Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, out of that office. He was told to leave the Department of Finance and if he did not go to Brussels he would have gone back to Kildare.

See this speech in context