Seanad debates

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

The question about quangos is important, because a few years ago we had so many quangos one could not count them. We are in the business of reducing quangos. First of all, existing State companies, a number of which have expressed interest, are being seriously considered. The Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government and NewERA are meeting with these bodies to identify how they would do the job if they got it and the criteria that would apply. The intention is most certainly to examine the possibility that the water company will be an amalgamation of existing local authority staff and will include, as many people here have mentioned, an existing organisation. This is what we all want. However, if it is Bord na Móna, the ESB or whatever, we must be careful to ensure the new entity is separated from the mothership, as we could call it. The water company would have to be totally separate from its parent company and all of its borrowing requirements and so on would need to be separated. Then there are all sorts of other issues to do with human resources and so on.

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