Jim Walsh (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister will respect the fact we will be extremely anxious to ensure this will not become a private monopoly. If we had gone down the route of trying to engender competition, it would control costs because this is generally the recipe for keeping costs right. A suggestion we made, which was not examined at all, obviously, was to have an overarching body which would have ensured efficiency in the local authority system and would have assessed and compared local authorities and ensured best practice applied across the board. I fully acknowledge there is need for investment in the infrastructure and the distribution system. Many local authorities are good exemplars of this, but many are not. The significant difference between those which are good and those which are not is that those which are good had good county managers but the others did not.

I acknowledge the Minister has made a good effort to try to resolve the issue. In the past he has shown good sports judgment and he has applied it to this.