Brendan Ryan (Labour)

There is a well-known cliché about the extraordinary shape a horse designed by a committee would take. There is a degree to which this agency is a classic and not very aesthetically appealing fudge and compromise between two fairly strong-minded Ministers neither of whom, at least superficially, was prepared to be seen to lose. I agree with Senator Higgins that ultimately the Minister for Finance got his way but it was by way of a fairly ugly fudge – I mean that in the aesthetic sense. I am not implying anything else.

The contradictions in the area of regulation deserve to be increasingly addressed by the Oireachtas because it is strange that two passions seem to have simultaneously emerged in most western democracies. One is a huge passion for deregulation. The other is an equally huge passion for the effective decoupling of the State from any activities and the substitution of the role of the State with the role of independent regulators. This is happening in relation to telecommunications and electricity. There is this wonderful passion for the elimination of regulation, on the one hand, while, on the other, there is an increase in belief in the efficacy of regulation.

I am not persuaded about the efficacy of regulation. I say this from a considerable personal and professional interest in the environment. There is a standard argument about regulation that the regulator will never know as much about an area being regulated as the area does about itself. The environmental regulator will never know as much about an industry that he or she is regulating as the industry itself. The electricity regulator will never know as much about electricity generating as the electricity generators know, because if the electricity regulator was as knowledgeable and expert as the people he or she was regulating, he or she would be in the business of generating electricity. If the environmental regulator knew as much about the intricacies of the pharmaceutical industry as those working in the industry, the environmental regulator would be running a pharmaceutical plant for much greater reward and considerably greater benefit to himself or herself. That is the standard argument that has been used for the past 30 years about environmental regulation and it is one that applies universally. The regulator can never be as expert as the regulated.