Thomas Gould (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

My questioning is intended to get information from the witnesses and it is not directed at them personally. I respect the work they do and I thank them for being here. To have an acknowledgement now, however, that it looks like we will have multiple cases taken against for breaches in respect of not reaching targets is an indictment in this regard. Irish Water is now carrying the can for decades of underinvestment. The point, however, is that we have targets that the Government has committed to and it has a duty of care then to ensure that Irish Water has the resources to tackle this undertaking. I believe that water services should be in public ownership, that there should be a referendum on water to enshrine that right in the Constitution and that we should have a non-commercial semi-State entity. We brought people onto the streets years ago to ensure this was the case. People who fought to stop the privatisation of the water services might be listening now. We are looking at how Irish Water is performing and we have the witnesses from the EPA and the HSE with us. We are talking about the quality of drinking water and when we look at the figures, some 565,000 people have been impacted and 243,000 have ongoing problems. As a percentage of the 4 million people who use the water services, these are huge figures. Am I wrong in saying that?