Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein)
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123. To ask the Minister for Environment, Community and Local Government if he will provide the current staffing levels at Irish Water, broken down into different categories of engineers, call centre staff and so on. [5843/14]

Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael)
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The Water Services Act 2013 provided for the establishment of Irish Water as a subsidiary of Bord Gáis Éireann to be formed and registered under the Companies Act. A fundamental underpinning of the water reform programme is to ensure that the skills and experience built up over many years in local authorities are put to best use for the long-term benefit of the customer and that there is no negative impact on service to customers during the transition. The Water Services (No.2) Act 2013 transferred statutory responsibility for water services to Irish Water and provided for local authorities to act as agents for Irish Water, with this relationship being expressed through Service Level Agreements. The majority of the existing staff remain employees of local authorities working under such arrangements from 1 January 2014.

Irish Water is currently recruiting to build up the internal capabilities required within the organisation and the number of staff employed is an operational matter for the organisation. It was agreed by the Steering Group for the Water Sector Reform programme that, to ensure skills within the sector were fully availed of in building up the new organisation, competitions for positions in asset management, capital delivery and operations would be restricted to staff in the partner organisations i.e. Bord Gáis Éireann, local authorities and my Department in the first instance. Open competitions are held for all other positions and details of these are available on Irish Water’s website .

Data supplied to my Department by Irish Water indicates that 346 staff have been recruited to up to 31 January 2014. The breakdown of these staff by department is as follows: