Sandra McLellan (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. This is flawed legislation that clearly has not been properly thought through. From an environmental, social and economic point of view it is a deeply problematic item of legislation and, yet again, we see the hand of Fianna Fáil all over its pages. It was Fianna Fáil which initially dreamt up the idea to charge households for water by installing water meters in every house in Ireland. Now the Government has jumped on the bandwagon, and hence we have this legislation before the House.

The plan is to establish Irish Water as a subsidiary of Bord Gáis Éireann, a company, according to the Government's own pronouncements, that it plans to sell off some time in the near future. That new company will in turn be given the power to install water meters in every dwelling in the country and then to charge families for the water they use.

Sinn Féin is opposed to this legislation for a number of reasons. We do not believe that the installation of a meter in every home in the country has been properly costed. For example, various experts, including the local authority professional officers' association, estimate the cost of such installation to be at least €1.2 billion. That is an exorbitant amount of money which one can only assume will eventually be passed on to the consumer.

Even more alarming is the fact that charging for water effectively means that people will be paying three times for the water they drink. First, the public will pay by way of general taxes; second, they will pay through the new charge; and third, they will pay through the National Pensions Reserve Fund, which is being used to fund the installation of the water meters.

This proposal will serve merely to place an added burden on the shoulders of already hard-pressed families. Is this Government not aware that, as we speak, people are already at their wits' end in an effort to put food on the table and pay their mortgages? Is the Government so out of touch with reality that it believes it is acceptable and fair that a family, a single person or the working poor should, according to this legislation, be obliged to pay the same amount for their water as the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Phil Hogan? That is bizarre and displays a total disregard for or lack of consciousness about even the most basic form of environmental justice.

Before my party is accused of being woolly-headed about the issue of water conservation I will make it clear that Sinn Féin is very much in favour of a sustainable and co-ordinated approach to the management of the country's water. Key to that, however, is the related issue of sustainability and environmental justice. We must not under any circumstances return to an era in which poor children and adults have to go around unwashed in soiled and dirty clothes because they cannot afford to pay their water charges.

The Bill, in its current form, would produce these very circumstances.

With regard to sustainability, Sinn Féin proposes investing money from the National Pensions Reserve Fund to create real jobs for some of the almost 500,000 people who are currently unemployed. Instead of wasting money on water meters, as currently proposed, Sinn Féin urges the Government to invest money in upgrading our current distribution system, which is both ageing and leaking.

International evidence, from the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe, shows clearly that metering is simply not a good idea. It is not good for families or the poor, and it is not good from an environmental perspective. Rather, it is merely an ill-conceived idea proposed and supported by a Government which, yet again, is quite willing to make the ordinary people pay for the economic maelstrom in which we now find ourselves.

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