We are into something approaching high farce on this issue when the Minister tells us according to his statement issued yesterday, there has been gross misrepresentation of his directive to the ESB. It is not just me, or indeed the media, who are involved in this. Apparently the board of the ESB misrepresented him too. I have the letter from the board of the ESB, dated 30 January 1992, in which they refer to the Minister's letter "regarding the use of the ESB of its billing system to provide its customers with credit facilities". That is what the board of the ESB believed. Was that misrepresentation? In the second paragraph of their letter, the board continue:
Your directive requires the instant discontinuance of a service to the whole community, which has been in existence for over 60 years and in which the Board is specifically empowered to engage under the Electricity (Supply) Act, 1927.
That is what the board thought the Minister meant, as did the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and the trade unions. I thought so too. It is a little rich to have all that represented as somebody else's mistake, that he got it right and the rest of us got it wrong. Let us remember what the Minister's position was last Thursday, and I quote from his remarks to the Dáil. I am grateful to his office and for the speed with which they supplied me with a copy:
My decision will not prevent the ESB from selling white or brown electrical goods and will not prevent the ESB from providing alternative credit arrangements for such sales, as long as they are arranged on an arm's length basis just like any other appliance dealer.
There are questions to be asked about what that meant. Does that mean they are not supposed to use people's electricity bill performance as a rough and ready index of people's credit worthiness? That is one of the advantages of the ESB; it is one of the reasons it can offer such a simplified service. Let us go on. The Minister said last Thursday:
Finally, I would like to repeat that it is now up to the ESB to adjust to the new competitive situation in which they will find themselves and to arrange for alternative credit facilities for their customers at arm's length from their core monopolistic electricity business, just like any other electrical retailer.
The truth is that it is very hard to get alternative credit facilities if you are poor, if you do not have a bank account and if you are trying to borrow small sums. Our great big banks do not believe in lending less than £500 any more. The ESB's 150,000 customers who find these existing credit facilities useful were supposed to be told last Saturday, at a moment's notice, to find alternative credit facilities. The Minister pleaded misrepresentation and, apparently, the board of the ESB misunderstood him. They hold him:
There is no alternative credit system available which we can develop, and if you insist that the present arrangement be discontinued the Board can see no alternative but to cease trading in electrical retail and shut down many of its local outlets which of course are both shops and customer service centres. Without financial support of the retailing activity there will be no economic justification for maintaining ESB centres in many of the provincial towns in Ireland.
At this stage we have the Minister on a competition crusade which is more committed than the person who has the legal obligation to protect competition, the Director of Consumer Affairs and Fair Trade. No matter how selectively the Minister quotes from his report, the Director of Consumer Affairs and Fair Trade concluded that the ESB was not in breach of any competition policy as he understood it.
The Minister told us he was misrepresented yet again, and in his latest statement, yesterday, he forgot about competition. It was not mentioned in his statement and, now, he is suddenly concerned about the customers getting the wrong impression and he says:
The Minister was concerned that customers for electricity appliances be fully aware that their electricity account is a separate issue from the payments of sums due on credit sales or hire purchase transactions. Any sum tendered for electricity supplied must be credited for that purpose. No recourse may be had to any possible discontinuance of electricity supply by the ESB to achieve payments of sums due for goods bought by ESB customers. The ESB should collect its debts for these sales in the same way as any other trader does, under the law.
There was nothing new in that because the Director of Consumer Affairs and Fair Trade in his report for May 1990, makes it prefectly clear that, under the law, the people already have the right to all of that.
The Minister is now making it up as he goes along. Competition is gone. All the talk that we used to have about a level playing field is gone. The problem is that the ESB has been successful. As the Director of Consumer Affairs and Fair Trade showed, once it reorganised itself, it began to bite at people who had a cosy little arrangement among themselves. It gave people the things they wanted and now we have a position where we have forgotten about competition.
Most people want to know what precisely is going on? What has changed? What is the reason for the directive? What is the directive? What will it mean for the ESB appliance sales? Last Thursday there was a directive to provide alternative credit arrangements at arm's length, now it is a touching concern for the ESB's customers so that they would not make a mistake and confuse their appliance bill with their electricity bill.
I believe that ordinary people are perfectly capable of managing their own affairs. I thought the Progressive Democrats took the same view because they had a lot of talk about people's capacity to manage their own money and getting the State off people's backs, but the average ESB customer needed the intervention of the Minister for Energy to explain the difference between an appliance and electricity. If that is the case then so be it, let us get it sorted out.
I think what happened was that the Minister decided he would look after the private sector at the expense of the public sector and discovered to his amazement, but not to mine, that the Irish people take a very different view about things like that. The Minister tells us that all he wanted to do was look after the customers. The Radio and Television Retail Association still think he is talking about competition. Everybody is confused. I saw a member of the Opposition trying to get clarification in the Dáil this morning, so perhaps we will get clarification. It would be wonderful if we did.
Can the Minister tell us what he means? Does he want separate bills in the same envelope or even separate printing on the same bill or is he still telling people that you cannot get credit from the ESB directly, you must have some sort of arm's length arrangement? What does he mean by that? Can people pay their electricity bill and their appliance credit instalment at the same time, in the same place? What is going on? The country is in total confusion. If we understand what the Minister is saying, then he has done a somersault. To his credit, at least, he has responded to public opinion.
I would like to know what is going on. The world outside, the poor people of this country who rely on the ESB, the whole of our society which regards the ESB as giving a good service, at a good price, would like to know what is going on. The recent opinion polls show Irish public opinion rated the ESB as a far better and far more acceptable partner in society than either House of the Oireachtas and rated it as more highly thought of than the Church itself.
The ESB looks after its customers well and has a good system for doing so. It checks their credit rating, it gives credit, often interest free, it enables people to plan their purchases and to buy much of what are now almost the necessities of life, all in an uncomplicated way. People know what they are doing. The problem is that the ESB is too good at it. The ESB went from being a loss-making joke in the retail business a few years ago to being profitable, competitive and well able to compete with the rest of the private sector. It did that by doing precisely the same things it had always done, using the billing system to advertise its products, using what was available to it creatively, to its own benefit and that of its customers. Because of that it made a profit.
I get the impression that whatever is said about the left and profitability, the people most hostile to profit in our State are the ideological right-wingers who resent seeing a State enterprise make money, because it disproves all their ideological nonsense. That is the bottom line on this whole controversy. The Minister who usually has a bit of sense foolishly walked into ideological claptrap last week. This ideological nonsense deems the existence of a public sector monopoly to be a bad thing. Its capacity to serve its customers is deemed to be a bad thing, ideologically and out of that ideology came a nonsensical decision which I hope is in the process of being reversed.
The ESB is a large successful organisation, internationally respected. I know this as an engineer. The quality and the technical expertise in the ESB, in a whole host of areas including electricity generation, project management, cost assessment, etc., is internationally recognised by the engineering profession. It is a substantial earner of revenue for this State by its international contracting service. It builds large projects in budget and on time. One of the reasons for that is that it is run by engineers and I say that with the arrogance that always goes with my profession. Engineers work on very simple things. They work on the facts and look for a solution that will work.
The problem about this decision as it originally stood, when it was based on competition as distinct from the touching concern for the customers, is that it ignored the fact that this system actually appealed to the people. The reason it was successful was not because of any abuse of a monopolistic position, or some threat but because people liked it. People liked it because it was simple, straightforward, friendly and manageable.
It is an outrageously wrong decision and a terrible reflection on the increasing remoteness of this Minister and, apparently, his party from ordinary life, to imagine anything else. I do not know why so many Members of this House, including our ex-Cathaoirleach, Members of the party in front of me and the parties over there and so many Members of the other House became involved in this. Do they really believe it would be better for consumers to be locked into perpetual renting of various electrical appliances, never owning anything, with the appalling waste of money that goes into renting, instead of having the guarantee of security and continuity and the guarantee that the company will always be there that goes with the ESB?
I conclude, in deference to the Minister's wishes to be out of the House reasonably speedily, as I have no desire to cause an election by delaying him here. I, the country, the media and the trade unions would like to know a number of things. Can the ESB still use or do they propose to use customers' performance in paying their electricity bills as an assessment of creditworthiness? Can the arrangements about credit be made on the spot when people are buying their appliances? Can people pay for the appliances when they go into the ESB to pay their electricity bill, will they get their appliance bill along with the ESB bill, or will the ESB now be put in the ridiculous position of having to pay double for the postage? What is going on? Nobody, at this stage, including myself, understands anything other than that, apparently, the Minister is in a desperate rush to back off from a position he walked into rather foolishly less than two weeks ago?
