Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

You guys are responsible for that and you did nothing about it. Now, under the auspices of the troika deal, the Government is moving to introduce charges and metering and to establish this company.

The agenda is very simple because Fine Gael has had it for a long time. It tried to introduce water charges before and was defeated by mass public opposition. Its agenda is the same as that of the European Union and the IMF. Everywhere the IMF has gone it has demanded the privatisation of water services and the introduction of water charges and always the results have been the same, massively increased costs for ordinary citizens and a massive bonanza of profits for private corporations and multinational companies. That is the agenda being pursued - the privatisation of public resources for private profit. Once the Bill is passed, as sure as night follows day, our water resources will be on the road towards privatisation. I am not the only one saying this. I have been trumpeting this for a while and I hope the media will pick up on it. We will be required to privatise our water resources once the Government begins charging for them because EU law demands it. It is as simple as that.

I see the Minister of State's officials shaking their heads. I will read from the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, Article 106, which the Minister of State can read it afterwards: "Undertakings entrusted with the operation of services of general economic interest or having the character of a revenue-producing monopoly shall be subject to the rules contained in the Treaties, in particular to the rules on competition". That will be legally enforceable once we start to charge. Irish Water will be a "revenue-producing monopoly" subject to the rules of competition, which means any private corporation that wants to get into the market will have the legal right to a level playing field. We will have market competition in the water sector and privatisation will follow, just as it did once we began to charge for waste collection. Other private companies began to complain to local authorities that there had to be a level playing field and it led inexorably to privatisation, as those of us who opposed the introduction of bin charges said it would. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil at the time denied it, saying it would not lead to privatisation and that actually charging would prevent privatisation. It did not, rather it led inexorably to privatisation and so will this. That is the real agenda and the troika, the IMF, and the European Commission are well aware of it. They want to plunder our water resources to the benefit of the same corporate interests that helped to bankrupt this country in the first place.

The consequences of privatisation have been disastrous everywhere. A recent report by Corporate Accountability International, Shutting the Spigot on Private Water, the Case for the World Bank to Divest, points out that 34% of all water contracts market-wide entered between 2000 and 2010 have failed or are in distress, four times the failure rate of comparable infrastructural projects in the electric and transportation sectors. The report, published on the tenth anniversary of what I am glad to say was the failed attempt to privatise water services in Bolivia where it was defeated by a mass movement of the Bolivian people, goes on to state, "public investment in infrastructure has proven time and again to be the only viable means of delivering broad and equitable access to water". The UN world water report in 2006 noted something very important: "There is enough water for everyone". It added that water insufficiency was often due to "mismanagement, corruption, lack of appropriate institutions, bureaucratic inertia and a shortage of new investments in building human capacity and physical infrastructure". That is certainly right. In a country where it pours down day in and day out we have water shortages because of the gross failure of the political and State authorities to make the necessary investment in water infrastructure. There is no objective shortage of water, but private interests have it in their interest that people see it that way to justify charging for water.

The Minister of State will say charging, which will lead to privatisation, will improve matters, but the experience has been terrible absolutely everywhere. In our nearest neighbour, Britain, the facts are clear. Margaret Thatcher privatised water services and prices increased dramatically year on year. Profits for the private corporations went through the roof. Companies exaggerated the level of investment they would make but failed to deliver that investment and instead used it to increase shareholder dividends. There was a massive concentration of ownership in the hands of multinationals, mostly American, French and British. There were executive pay bonanzas as the amount executives paid themselves went through the roof. Jobs were lost everywhere and disconnections of water supply increased. Public health deteriorated and the level of investment in water infrastructure fell overall, with the result that water quality deteriorated. Incredible droughts occurred in parts of Britain and public cynicism about the conservation of water reached all-time highs because people knew that private companies did not give a damn about conservation but cared only about profit. People were turned off the green agenda for water conservation because they knew that the only beneficiaries were the private companies.

Private water companies have also been some of the biggest culprits in big pollution scandals; 205 major pollution occurrences in Britain were caused by private water companies. I do not have time to go through all the statistics, but they are shocking. After the first four years of privatisation prices increased by 50% and by a further 18% in the five years after that. Meanwhile profits went through the roof. The pre-tax profits of private water companies doubled in the first year of privatisation and rose by 142% in real terms over eight years. Between 1990-1 and 1997-8 the pre-tax profits of the ten water and sewerage companies rose by 140%, with sewerage and water prices rising respectively by 42% and 36%, a direct correlation between increased profits for the private companies and shareholders and increased prices for the poor domestic user of water. That is what has happened everywhere and the investment in infrastructure has not happened. In fact, the percentage of the British water system now considered to be completely substandard has increased since water services privatisation. The idea that involving the private sector will be in any way beneficial is rubbish. There is no evidence to back it up. It will be a profits bonanza because the private companies will have a captive market which needs water and the Government is going to help them legally to get money from people for a resource that is necessary for human life.

The cross-over between the financial crisis in the State, Fine Gael's and the troika's privatisation agenda and the injustice facing ordinary citizens is exposed when we consider that one of the companies in the offing for water meter installation is owned by the billionaire Mr. Denis O'Brien who has bought out Siteserv.

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