Brian Ó Domhnaill (Fianna Fail)

I am trying to point out that we are giving private inspectors the power to make determinations and judgments on the basis of the current Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, which presumably will be signed into regulation by the Minister. If the Minister were to follow the 1996 Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, which are being adopted in Cavan and are acceptable to the European Commission and the European Court of Justice, we would be dealing with something entirely different. The Minister needs to clarify for the purposes of the record which guidelines he is talking about signing into regulation at this stage.

I appeal to the Minister to specify whether the inspectors will be private, or public as we are proposing in our amendment. We are suggesting that the inspectors should be employed from agency staff or local authority staff. We need to know how many inspectors the Minister envisages will be required to inspect this country's 475,000 septic tanks. I understand from what the Minister said earlier that just 20% of septic tanks will be inspected.