Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am speaking in place of Deputy Fleming who cannot be with us. The decision to bring Irish Water under the FOI legislation is the correct one and the Government's climbdown is welcome. The Government is implicitly accepting that it should not have rejected a Fianna Fáil amendment to the FOI legislation when it went through the Oireachtas last October that would have achieved the same outcome. We now need more than a change in the law. We need a complete change of culture with regard to Irish Water.

The instinct up to now has been to operate the company solely in the interests of management and of the aim of raising money for the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. The needs of customers must now be put at the heart of what Irish Water is doing and this will require an openness and transparency which, sadly, has been lacking to date.

While the extension of FOI to Irish Water is a welcome and long overdue decision, it will be totally inadequate if there is no corresponding commitment on the part of the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government to provide full accountability through parliamentary questions regarding what is, in effect, a State monopoly set up for the express purpose of levying water charges on families throughout the nation. The Minister should confirm his intention to provide as much information as possible in response to parliamentary questions relating to Irish Water and not force Opposition parties, investigative journalists or concerned citizens to have to submit further FOI requests for what should be routinely available information. We need to get away from the minimalist approach regarding the provision of information. I think it was the former Taoiseach, John Bruton, who famously said that he was not asked the right question when explaining why he did not give a particular piece of information. It is often said that sunlight is the best cleanser. Given the controversy in which Irish Water has been enveloped to date, it could certainly do with some sunlight. It should take a proactive approach to readily providing information that is requested in recognition that it is ultimately there to serve the public and not its management and indeed the Minister.

FOI requests will help shine a light on the culture and practices of the organisation but it will take political action to change the direction of the company, which has been significantly focused to date on putting in place a billing structure to extract money from families with no recognition of the need to achieve value for the customer. The claim made by Professor John Fitzgerald of the ESRI that Irish Water will incur excess costs of up to €150 million per year is indeed alarming. It is essential that the information necessary to verify or refute this claim is made readily available by Irish Water. Irish Water is essentially a State monopoly and when it becomes subject to FOI, claims of commercial and supplier confidentiality must not be used to routinely inhibit the level of detail that will be provided in response to FOI requests. It must be possible to look at actions right back to the inception of Irish Water. The commitment the Minister has made to make the FOI provisions retrospective to last July are welcome but we need to see how this will apply in practice. Any attempt to wriggle out of full transparency will only further fuel public suspicion that the Government's commitment to increasing access to information is more about spin than anything else. As stands, every time the Minister is asked about the pricing regime and the nature of the free allowance, we are told that they are matters for the Commission for Energy Regulation, CER. Members of the public have been led to believe that there will be a generous free allocation but it now transpires that customers will pay a substantial standing charge negating the concept of a free allowance. It is imperative that the process deployed for charges is brought out into the open. The Minister should not be allowed to hide behind the CER when it is essentially doing his bidding.

The extension of FOI to Irish Water is an opportune time to look at the additional costs the Minister is imposing on FOI requests. The Minister should commit to coming back to and reviewing these additional charges in the next 12 months. I am conscious that only yesterday I asked a question of the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government in respect of the establishment of the Water Services Transition Office, which is the body formed by the County and City Managers' Association and which has had something of the order of €5.7 million allocated to it. I wanted via the question to establish who had received that money. I note that while I am told in the response that €3.5 million was paid in 2013 for the recoupment of costs for an average of two or three representatives of each county council, I have not been told who these people were.

Were those moneys in addition to the salaries already received by the councillors or were they in lieu of salaries? Were they paid to county managers? If we are to have a full approach to freedom of information, this is the type of information that we need to be able to receive on a routine basis.

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