Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein)

Apart from the fact that water charges represent another imposition on already hard-pressed households, they will not, as claimed, address the major issues surrounding wastage. The generally quoted estimate for the amount of water lost between source and consumer is 40%. For my county this is much higher, at 48% in 2008. There is clearly an issue to be addressed, but surely the expected cost of €500 million or more to install household meters could be better used. If that money was spent on upgrading and improving the efficiency of the supply system, it would do much more to cut down on the amount of water being lost.

Much of the wastage that does take place is in commercial outlets rather than domestic homes. The last time I spoke on this issue in the Dáil, I cited the example of Starbucks in Britain. A number of years ago Starbucks, due to constant running of water taps, was wasting 1.63 million litres of water every day - the equivalent of the daily usage of a town of over 10,000 people. Undoubtedly, there are similar examples of commercial wastage here. This is something that ought to be tackled before additional charges are placed on domestic households, many of which would find water charges a major additional burden on their income.

I note from reading the Fine Gael Private Members' motion that was debated here in January that it stressed the need to allocate central funding to investing in and weather-proofing the mains in order to tackle wastage. I also note that it was not suggested anywhere in the motion that households be metered and charged for domestic usage. In fairness, Fine Gael did state that it favoured water charges and metering in its election manifesto. The Labour Party, on the other hand, stated in its manifesto that it was opposed to water charges. It is clearly stated, "Labour does not favour water charges". At least Fine Gael was honest about this issue. When the Minister of State, Deputy Fergus O'Dowd, was asked about this in April, he claimed the origin of water charges, and the reason they have to be imposed, lay in the memorandum of understanding underlying the IMF-EU bank bailout. Again, that displays some honesty.

At least we now know this aspect of the Government's policy is being dictated by external and unelected people. The same applies to the planned attack on wage orders and the joint labour committee regulatory system, the review of the credit unions and so on. Water charges have nothing to do with conservation or even local finances. They are all about finding more ways of extracting people's hard-earned household budgets to pay back an unsustainable debt contracted on behalf of a small group of incompetent, and in some cases corrupt, speculators, many of whom will not have to worry about paying water charges because they have already scurried away to their tax havens.

The Fine Gael proposal in its Private Members' motion last January to establish one publicly owned water authority also had merit. Sinn Féin would support the establishment of such a body, as long as it would be on an all-Ireland basis given the logic of managing this resource on a national scale rather than having it divided, as it is currently, among different authorities. We would also insist that such a single body would not be seen as preparing the way for the eventual privatisation of the water supply.

The McCarthy report did not explicitly call for this although it did recommend, in line with the EU-IMF template, that metering be introduced and referred to the emergence of a commercialised water sector. The report engaged in some convoluted philosophising about natural monopolies and how they are best regulated. It also recommended that when they are privatised, the State would adopt the same so-called safeguards as in Britain. These are supposed to protect security of supply and so on.

The report neglected, however, the historical fact utilities such as water were taken into public ownership in the first place. It was not because of any ideological imperative but because private enterprise could not make profits from a universal supply. To now sell off such utilities, having been built up over generations with public investment, would be immoral and a regressive step. It would also, as has been the experience in other countries including Britain, mean not only paying for water but paying for a worse service.

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