Niall Collins (Limerick, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There is no doubt that this issue, as it has played out in the public airwaves and in the hearts and minds of the public in recent weeks and days, has done major damage to the confidence and trust in the political systems or what remains of them among the public. This is singularly damaging and it reflects badly on the Government. People are asking why their public representatives are being denied the opportunity to ask questions and hold the Government to account. Why is it that a brick wall has been put up, that the curtain has been pulled and that we have had this silence all along? It is simply not good enough.

With respect to the Minister of State, Deputy O'Dowd, I am unsure whether he has been fully in the loop about all that has happened all along. The Minister of State has been sent in to the House to front up for the Government tonight. The Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Hogan, should make himself available tonight to try to clear up some of the questions. The public are deeply unhappy.

We have had the turn of the year and many of the measures in the budget have kicked in. Last week, we saw elderly people being discriminated against - that is the only way I can describe it. This relates to the housing aid for elderly people and the way the grant criteria have been re-engineered to discriminate against some people.

People have a fundamental distrust of this Government when it comes to accountability. We saw this as recently as the Seanad referendum. What was the message the people sent to the political establishment? They have no wish to see power centralised in a small number of hands. They want to see more accountability. They want to see the Taoiseach in the House answering questions like he should be doing, instead of narrowing the opportunity to be held to account and to hold the Government to account. They have no wish to see the Cabinet being run by the four-member Economic Management Council, which is accountable to no one. We have no idea what they discuss or what decisions they arrive at. We hear other Ministers saying they are excluded from discussions and decisions that are being taken by the Economic Management Council.

The whole system of accountability, holding the Government open to scrutiny and allowing us to question in the public interest is being fundamentally attacked by the Government. This was clearly demonstrated before Christmas with the freedom of information legislation. Members on this side of the House, including ourselves, put forward some perfectly reasonable amendments to open up Irish Water to scrutiny under the Freedom of Information Act. All the people, including Government backbenchers and Ministers, who now want to have accountability for Irish Water and who expressed surprise at the costs, voted against the proposal before Christmas. Now, they want to open it up. When we sought documents under the freedom of information legislation, the document I have before me is what we got. It has been entirely redacted and we cannot make any sense out of it.

When the Minister of State is responding on behalf of the Government, he should address several issues for us. The PricewaterhouseCoopers Government-commissioned report, which cost a good deal of money, recommended a new entity be established. Why was that not accepted? What rationale did the Minister, Deputy Hogan, and the Government come up with to reject the recommendations in that report? People want to know. Can the Minister of State tell us why funds from the local property tax are being channelled into Irish Water? The people were told that the local property tax was to go towards the provision of local services through our local authorities, but that is not happening. Can the Minister of State tell us why the service level agreements between Irish Water were not discussed, debated or presented to local government members throughout the country as part of the estimates process before Christmas? They only arrived during the Christmas period and local authority managers signed off on them at that stage. There was no public debate, scrutiny or discussion around the matter. These service level agreements will feed into issues such as water quality, which was discussed in the House before Christmas, and other issues, including the free allowance and the standing charge.

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