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

I will not mention his name again. Anyway, we all know who it is.

Siteserv will provide contracting services for Bord Gáis. When this company was taken over, it had €110 million written off a €150 million debt owed to Anglo Irish Bank when the bank was under State control. To my mind, that says it all about what is going on. The corporate vultures in this country and elsewhere in Europe know that if one gets hold of a water company, it is a money bonanza forever and a day. The same corporate interests which have grabbed control of our media and money-making services that ordinary people need are moving into water services because this is the first step in the privatisation of that infrastructure. Ordinary people will end up paying for this.

Fine Gael has long supported the introduction of water charges and privatisation. It is sickening in the extreme that the Labour Party is now complicit in this agenda. I have a leaflet produced by the Tánaiste, Deputy Eamon Gilmore, for his constituency in the early 1990s. It reads: “Water charges are just another tax on workers on top of PAYE, PRSI and levies”. How right he was. It goes on to boast about the fact that Democratic Left, under his leadership and others, had successfully defeated the agenda of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to introduce water charges. Some other lines are absolutely priceless. For example, he attacked the Fianna Fáil-Labour Party Government for demanding more from the PAYE taxpayer, while cutting mortgage interest relief, VHI relief and imposing a residential property tax. The leaflet then declares, “Now, they want to make us pay for water”. How right he was to condemn this and resist it, as people did successfully. How sickening it is that he is now a party to imposing that injustice on citizens who are in a far greater state of financial distress than when he wrote that leaflet.

The only answer to this agenda of piling austerity measures and charges on ordinary citizens is for them to do what the people of Bolivia did. They must get out on the streets to resist and mobilise against this attempt to rifle our natural resources, whether it is water, forests which the Government is now planning to sell off, or our oil and gas given away to multinational corporations. These are the very tools that could be used to generate economic recovery and provide employment. However, they are being given away to profiteers and the country will pay a terrible price if the Government gets away with it. We will be resisting it every step of the way.

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