Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

By mentioning extraneous issues when we are trying to develop good legislation, the Deputies opposite are diverting our attention from issues of detail that will have a huge effect on ordinary people's lives. I ask the Minister to accept this amendment, which seeks to ensure that before this legislation is commenced and registration begins, we will know the standards that will apply in cases of maintenance and upgrading. We want to ensure we will have had an opportunity to see whether the standards to be proposed by the Minister will stand up to a challenge. If the standards are so easy and so different from those set out in the 2009 code of practice of the EPA, as the Minister keeps saying they are, they should withstand our scrutiny. Before we can agree to anything, we will have to ensure the standards cannot be overruled in a court case in Brussels. As a Deputy quite rightly pointed out, Irish Governments have introduced many laws in the belief that they were firewalled against challenge from Brussels. The original laws in this case can be included in that list. Unfortunately, when non-governmental organisations have gone to Brussels, we have often found that what we thought was firewalled is firewalled no longer. We cannot take a chance on this issue. Is the Minister willing to accept amendment No. 2 so that we can get the guarantee we need, so that the prescribed date for making the commencement order of registration, shall not happen sooner than the making of the regulations in relation to maintenance, servicing and operation of the domestic water systems, so that we stop buying a pig in a poke, as the Minister has been trying to do for the past four or five months since he proposed this Bill?

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