James Bannon (Fine Gael)

The purpose of these amendments is to incorporate transparency into the Bill by ensuring that the Minister cannot delegate his duties of work to other persons or bodies. The legislation provides for the issuing of licences for which I presume a cost will be involved — for example, a body or group will have to pay an annual fee to renew its licence. If the Minister wants to introduce charges, it is important that he should do so himself rather than be able to claim that the imposition of such charges was the work of another body or authority. There is a responsibility on Government to be transparent and let any charges introduced by the Minister be on his own head.

We have a situation where many State bodies are being broken up and handed over to private and semi-private companies and all of those changes have involved charges. I fear this is the route the Minister wishes to pursue. On the Order of Business I observed Senator MacSharry, a Government Senator, calling for a debate on the funding of local authorities and I could detect the prospect of the introduction of water charges.