THE average cost per redundancy under the ESB Cost and Competitiveness Review (CCR) will be about £100,000, the House was told.

The CCR was undoubtedly a costly deal, the Minister for Transport, Energy and Communications, Mr Lowry, said at Question Time. But the issues involved were complex. For the past 70 years the ESB had a monopoly in the generation, transmission and supply of electricity. It had a highly skilled and well paid workforce. Its cost base, as shown by the independent consultants, McKinseys, was seriously out of line with best practice elsewhere. Against that background, the job of tackling excess costs was never going to be easy.

Successive governments had ruled out the option of compulsory redundancy. Therefore, to achieve a reduction of 2,000 in numbers, intensive negotiations were required and attractive terms had to be offered to those electing to leave on a voluntary basis and encourage those remaining to accept modern, more flexible and more productive work practices.

Mr Lowry was responding to Mr Robert Molloy (PD, Galway West) who said most people would be scandalised by the cost of redundancies and by the precedent they would set in the public sector.