Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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I want to make three points. I continue to be dissatisfied that we do not have oversight of Irish Water. There were major transfers of infrastructure involved. Somewhere in the region of €11 billion in assets - some of them were liabilities - went to Irish Water. We need to examine Irish Water's income, which is primarily from public funds. It has an income from commercial water services, but we do not know what the collection rate is. There are many elements that we need to examine. Some local authorities applied significant development contributions that were used to build up those assets. Now, they have found themselves with sizable deficits.

This all feeds into the question of the funding of local government. While the issue under discussion is a specific one, we have been told numerous times that a cross-departmental group was working on local authorities' baselines, that there would be winners and losers and that the distribution of, for example, local property tax to fund local authorities would be reconfigured. We were told by the Department earlier this year that the reconfiguration was imminent. Even though a report has been provided, however, we are being told that the Committee on Budgetary Oversight must consider it before decisions can be made. This is a gigantic issue in terms of the impact on local authorities' budgets, particularly in areas with rapidly growing populations.