Seanad debates

Tuesday, 10 December 2013

Water Services (No. 2) Bill 2013: Committee Stage

 

6:40 pm

Photo of Brian Ó DomhnaillBrian Ó Domhnaill (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Perhaps I misunderstood the Minister of State earlier during debate on the other amendment. I do not see the difficulty here. If we are all in agreement, then it should be a statutory obligation, and not an obligation that the agency deems fit itself. We should not be giving Irish Water the choice. Informing Irish Water that we had this debate in the Seanad and what the Senators recommended is not in the legislation. I asked a Deputy recently to submit a parliamentary question to the HSE, but the HSE wrote back and stated that it could not provide the information. It was a very simple information on specific statistics from hospitals. The HSE referred the inquiry to the Irish Medical Organisation, which would not provide the answer either as it claimed it had no legal obligation to do so. On that basis, I would not be happy with simply asking Irish Water to provide the information. I believe it should be on a statutory basis, and clear and concise.

Every local authority member across the country and every citizen in this State deserves to know where the public infrastructure of the State is going to be vested, when it will be vested and in whose control it rests. We are transferring public infrastructure across to a semi-State organisation, and we are afraid to include a statutory provision for an annual tabular report on a county by county breakdown. Councillors could debate this at council meetings if they were or were not happy. That is what we are looking for. A councillor does not have the facility to ask a parliamentary question.

The Minister of State's earlier answer was about ministerial orders and so on, but then writing to Irish Water was to be discretional. We could end up with my recent experience with the HSE and the IMO. We have to be clear and concise. Ministers in the past may not have been that clear, including some of my own Ministers who established organisations which should have been under more scrutiny. Let us learn from that and at least introduce this level of scrutiny, especially since Irish Water is not included in FOI legislation in its establishment procedures.

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