Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputies for their contribution and their support for this motion. Deputy Ó Fearghaíl characterised this as a climb-down but he was not here when we debated the FOI amendments on Committee Stage, when I explained the position on commercial semi-State companies. The default position of the new regime - to borrow a phrase from Deputy Wallace - will be that every public body will be included. The excluded public bodies are commercial semi-State bodies. We either determine that we are going to have a publicly owned commercial State sector, or we do not. No country has commercial semi-State companies that are open to a degree of transparency to which their rivals are not. Their rivals would put in the FOI requests. That is not the way it works. They are accountable under the Companies Acts as a commercial company. When I was debating this on Committee Stage, I said that where they are operating in monopoly positions, that argument would not hold. That is why I said I would look at dealing with the monopoly companies, including Irish Water, when the new legislation was enacted. I am now fast-tracking that because the enactment of the legislation is taking a bit longer and the issues that have arisen have become more acute and we need to address them. That is why I am extracting those, but we will be having a full debate on FOI generally.

Deputy Ó Fearghaíl made a point about the commentary of Professor John FitzGerald. A comprehensive rebuttal of that is available in today's Irish Independent from the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, factually dealing with issues as opposed to assertions that are made by people. People need to listen objectively, not hear just the noise, but also the facts. The objective of this whole process for Irish Water is to take 34 disparate water providers to establish one world class water utility that will provide a safe and adequate water supply to the people of Ireland. That is what is in train here.

I have argued Deputy Stanley's point about the exclusion of the semi-State companies with his colleagues on the public expenditure and finance committee. Whether it is the Sinn Féin view that it is in favour of public enterprise or not, we cannot spancel public enterprise and expect it to thrive. I am in favour of public enterprise. My party, by default, is in favour of public enterprise, but we need to have such enterprises operate on a level playing field with private companies. It is a code to kill off State enterprises to pretend that we can a new burden of regime on them------

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