Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party)

I have so many points to make and so little time. The Minister tries to portray the reform of water services delivery as harmless but we can demonstrate that the analysis on which the proposition is based is fundamentally flawed and the service will be enormously costly to the State and individual taxpayers. While I have no problem with this debacle being the Minister's historical legacy, there are far greater issues at stake.

The decision to set up Irish Water was based on analysis which local authority engineers have described as containing significant errors, omissions and inappropriate comparisons of such significance that the conclusions reached could not possibly be valid. They have demonstrated that PricewaterhouseCoopers produced its evidence for a comparison with Scottish Water based on completely wrong information. They claim that the Irish water pipe network was 25,000 km long but the reality is that it is closer to 50,000 km long. They claimed that 1,634 staff were involved in Scottish Water compared to the Irish context of approximately 4,000 staff when the reality is that the staff employed in Scottish Water, as per its annual report, is revealed to be 3,703. We have had an analysis accepted by the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government which states that the process and the trend has been away from municipal control in this area when the facts indicate the opposite is the case – 85% of water provision across Europe is under the control of municipal authorities.

I do not have the time to debate these points but the reality is that the expertise and staff are based and organised in 34 local authorities. They are the people on the ground, the water and sewerage caretakers, along with the local authority engineers. The Minister, in his proposal to establish Irish Water intends to fundamentally disrupt that operation. Not only that, but the PricewaterhouseCoopers report leaves out of the equation areas such as boundary issues, septic tanks, surface water drainage, planning and agriculture run-offs among other areas. They have not been addressed in the proposed reform. We will have a scenario where the profitable areas of water provision are hived off to Irish Water and the rest will be left with the local authorities to handle as they see fit. It is clearly going to be an incredibly unsatisfactory situation.

I take issue with the Minister on a couple of points. The first point, that we are the only country that does not charge for water services, is totally and utterly false. The Minister has some neck to come to the House and accuse the Irish people of getting something for nothing when it is recognised in the European Union that we have a derogation on water because we have paid for it through our central taxation and indirect taxation – the highest indirect taxation throughout Europe. The fact that the Government has chosen to take some of the money we have paid and use it to pay the private debts of banks, which is not really our problem, and to come back and ask us to pay again under the guise of water conservation is quite simply a con that Irish people are not going to fall for. The reason we are not is because we can demonstrate factually – Engineers Ireland and others will back us up in that regard – that the Minister's statement that significant reductions take place where water meters are installed is quite frankly absolute and utter rubbish which does not stand up to any independent scrutiny whatsoever. It has been demonstrated that domestic water meters can at best initially reduce consumption by on average 10%. Comparisons between Ireland and Britain where water is metered reveal a reduction of closer to 6%. Domestic water consumption is 16% of the total water used in society. Therefore, 6% of 16% is a reduction of less than 1%. The Minister proposes to spend more than €1 billion of taxpayers money which he then wants to impose on us in installation charges on our bills to save less than 1% of the water supply when one has a system in operation where, on average, 41% of the water supply leaks back into the ground. If this reform was about conservation the Minister would be fixing the pipes, dealing with the water that is unaccounted for and implementing rainwater harvesting programmes in schools and public buildings. That is not what the game is about; this is about a stealth tax. The Minister has not learned the lessons of the household tax. We can guarantee him that if he thought the opposition to the household tax was significant then he has seen absolutely nothing yet with this one.

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