Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

That is the question. How much water has been conserved as a result of that expenditure? It all relates to billing and charges. If we did not have water charges, and consequently did not have the requirement to install meters to monitor how much water people are using, how much of this expenditure would have been necessary? Is the vast majority of this expenditure about billing and charging rather than about building reservoirs, fixing water pipes, ensuring water quality, and the issues people are concerned about? Can the Irish Water representatives convince us that there will be real, meaningful savings?

Mr. Tierney has told us he gets €200,000 per year. In the semi-State sector there is a pay cap. He was paid less when he was city manager for Dublin City Council. His pay has gone up. How many extra executives who are not subject to the normal public sector pay caps have been employed as a result of the establishment of Irish Water? If those executive positions on salaries higher than if they were working on local authorities is indicative of so-called savings, it does not add up. We are paying more to do things previously done by local authorities.

I do not mean to personalise it, but that is what ordinary people are thinking. They are going to pay charges and the guy at the head of the company who will impose those charges on them is getting paid more than when he was in the local authorities. That is how ordinary people feel. They do not understand how Mr. Tierney is being paid more while they are being charged and ordinary workers in the public sector have had their wages slashed. Are we creating and paying for a big, expensive bureaucracy to charge people which is doing nothing for the water infrastructure of this country?

If I understand Mr. Tierney, last year Irish Water spent €50 million on consultants from a total spend of €100 million. By the end of the programme it will be €180 million and €80 million on consultants. More will be spent on consultants and set-up charges, and that does not even include the metering. This is all about office systems, IT software, billing, charging and bureaucracy. What the hell are these people doing for us? The issue is the taking over of €11 billion worth of assets that were not functioning well. It does not seem to me that establishing offices and software systems, and all the rest on which Irish Water has spent enormous amounts of money, addresses any of the key issues that face that water infrastructure.