Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

What he said in the past year and a half is farcical. I agree with Deputy Timmins and Deputy Finian McGrath. This whole thing is just a sop. When one looks at the history of Ervia, formerly Bord Gáis Éireann, it was always a very distant, remote organisation. Many felt it was not a cost-conscious organisation. It lashed costs onto consumers. A couple of winters ago it greatly increased gas prices for no obvious reason. The body that had the capacity to invigilate Ervia, previously Bord Gáis, was the Commission for Energy Regulation, CER. I do not have confidence in CER given the manner in which it did its job. The forum is to be placed within CER and to be more or less run by the Minister. Once again, it looks like a fig leaf to try to cover up the grave errors, mistakes and the disastrous history of the organisation. It seems a totally pointless exercise.

When one looks at the section, given that Deputy Stanley's amendment was not accepted, one also wonders how exactly the interests of consumers of Irish Water will be protected, in section 7(5)(a), given the overweening power of the Minister to make regulations. What exactly will Irish Water do with comments and suggestions? The point is that for the first 18 months or so of its putative existence, Members, as Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett so eloquently expressed, found trying to talking to this entity that seemed to have no existence required an incredible rigmarole of phone calls and e-mails. As another Deputy said, it was a case of machines talking to machines. We were trying to get a human voice into the conversation.

When one thinks of local drainage in the city and in the four Dublin local authorities which I know best, it seemed to be impossible to get to grips with it. We had a disaster, for example, in a part of my constituency, namely, the Howth Peninsula and environs in early August when we had major rainfall and consequent flooding. Irish Water seems to be an impossibly remote, vague entity. The normal response would have been to have recourse to the city engineer or county engineer, who did such a fine job through the decades with limited resources from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael-led Governments. We cannot have confidence that section 7 will have any real effect.

The Minister said he has the right to appoint experts. Who will such people be? Will they be from abroad? Is the Minister talking about people from Thames Water or another private company such as Veolia? The latter is a massive private company and the French state under the Socialist Party President is trying to reclaim water services and bring them back into the fold of the public sector. When the Minister launched a parallel document on housing, he said Fianna Fáil brought an end to social housing through privatisation and that the Government had to start from scratch. The Minister's responsibility is not to create another platform that could allow for the privatisation of one of the most important resources of the Irish people. That would be an appalling legacy for anyone who describes himself or herself as a representative of the Labour Party.

I refer to subsections and paragraphs (a), (b), (c), and (d). The history of the establishment of Irish Water has been disastrous. Some Fine Gael speakers referred back to the great difficulty involved in the establishment of the Electricity Supply Board, ESB, in the 1920s in the first ten years of the history of the State. I do not think, however, there was ever a period in the immediate years after independence - we are coming up to the 100th anniversary - when people felt such anger and rage. The ESB was welcomed with open arms. It took the company up to 40 years to bring electricity to the entire country. Parts of the country did not have electricity until relatively recent times which was disgraceful. The chief executive of Ervia, Michael McNicholas, is someone whom we know well and whom I met in my previous portfolio because he was the head of ESB International.

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