Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I am an engineer of sorts. There are many engineers who do not accept that chemical engineers are real engineers at all, but we can always say we are regarded more highly as engineers than software engineers. We are somewhere on the spectrum at least.

I try to inculcate a sense of basic safety into students when they begin the course I teach in the CIT. One of the most rudimentary things one has to teach young people is that electricity is dangerous. The statement that familiarity breeds contempt may be a cliché, but it would probably be more correct to describe it as a truism. Some people are blissfully unaware of the dangers associated with electricity.

One has to see electricity in this context to deal with the legislation. A dangerous or unsatisfactory job done by an electrical contractor is very different to an unsatisfactory job done by a plumber. A plumber may cause a huge amount of damage, but a bad job done by an electrical contractor puts lives at risk. I do not have statistics in this regard but I know we do not have a great on safety and it is not taken as seriously as it should be. We have genuine reason to be concerned about accident rates in many areas of activity.

In this era of the establishment of various regulators, be it ComReg or the Commission for Electricity Regulation, I have always noticed that although the rhetoric before their establishment is full of concerns about consumers, they rapidly get tied up with huge issues such as facilitating or organising the large-scale introduction of new players into the market. Every time one considers these bodies, one gets the impression that the ordinary consumer is seen only as the recipient of the values of competition. None of the regulators of which I am aware has shown any willingness to bat with the same enthusiasm for individual consumers and their right to the decent, safe, appropriately priced service that they want.