Paudie Coffey (Waterford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This amendment proposes to remove the requirement that a person be registered as a customer with Irish Water to be entitled to avail of the dispute resolution service to be offered by the Commission for Energy Regulation, CER. Subsection (4) of section 5 requires that for a person to make a complaint to the commission, he or she must already have exhausted any dispute resolution mechanism provided by Irish Water. This does not prevent any other person from making a complaint to Irish Water or from getting a remedy to a dispute through other avenues. However, the clear intention of section 5 is to provide an independent dispute resolution service for customers of Irish Water. Therefore, I cannot accept this amendment.