Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am tempted not to get into the water charges debate here around ring-fencing adequate funding. If we are not careful, we will get into the realm of funding for medium-term and long-term water projects having to compete with immediate spending commitments that we must decide year after year on budgets. That is the whole point of having a sustainable funding model for what we need here.

Many staff who are involved in the water sector had been working in local authorities. I agree there were some really good staff but the problem was each local authority was doing its own thing. There were 31 systems, many of which were not connected with each other at all. There was no interoperability. There were no economies of scale. There was no central skill set of staff because we did not have economies of scale. Irish Water is a single utility that can achieve many of the more national strategic goals that need to be attained around water that individual local authorities on their own could not do. I am not for one minute saying that local authorities were a disaster or whatever, but the outcome of having each local authority doing its own thing on water was a fairly bad outcome in terms of where the water infrastructure is today, and Irish Water is there to fix that.

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