Mr. Jorge Rodríguez Romero:

To summarise the German case, the court said the absence of a water pricing policy for a given water use is not in itself a breach because there is an exemption in Article 9(4) which allows member states, under certain conditions, not to apply water pricing policies to certain water use activities. This is the reasoning. This does not apply to domestic water pricing in the Germany's case because Germany has a generalised system of domestic water pricing based on metering and usually a tariff which has a fixed part and a variable part. It has a full cost recovery obligation in its law. I am talking about full cost recovery.

Legal archaeology, which we can carry out, sometimes helps us to understand and interpret what the intentions of the legislator were, but there is no hard obligation to recover 100% of costs in the Water Framework Directive. There is a principle of cost recovery and there is an obligation to establish cost recovery but there is some flexibility in the last paragraph of Article 9(1) which states that member state may take account of social and economic considerations and climatic conditions. It is for Ireland to find a solid way to have a consistent system that justifies, and can achieve, the goals of the Water Framework Directive and can consistently deliver funding for the required water infrastructure.