Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In fact, his party might even decide to run for election in the North. I wanted to put that issue to bed before speaking on the substantive issue.

I am speaking in support of our amendment which calls for the scrapping of water charges and the return of control of water services to democratically elected, reformed local authorities rather than leaving it in the hands of the corporate monster that Irish Water is becoming. We also call for a statutory assurance that water services will not be privatised in the future. Many members of the public suspect that once the cash register goes into the footpath outside their front door, the threat of privatisation is there. I have heard politicians say in the past that Bord Gais and many other State bodies would not be privatised but we have seen what happened in that regard.

While I welcome the fact that Fianna Fáil has tabled this motion and allowed more time to debate the issues surrounding water, we should not forget the fact that it was that party which agreed to establish a separate utility and to introduce water charges. Now we have some Fianna Fáil candidates in this State saying they want to abolish water charges and I have seen public meetings advertised to that effect. Back in December 2010 a memorandum of understanding was put in place and the then Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government agreed to establish a new entity, to take the control of water services away from local authorities and to introduce water charges. It is a bit hypocritical of Fianna Fáil to pretend that it is now concerned about the impact of water charges on householders, many of whom are already struggling to keep their heads above water.

It is also true, as the current Government spokespersons have said, that Fianna Fáil would have implemented water charges at a much higher rate and much sooner, in 2012. That is a fact and is on the record. These are not my words - Fianna Fáil put them on paper. It is also worth pointing out that the Labour Party promised, during the 2011 election campaign, to prevent Fine Gael from going ahead with its commitment to introduce an average annual domestic charge of €238. Indeed, it ran Tesco-style advertisements prior to the general election lambasting the proposals of its now partners-in-government to levy a water tax and highlighting how the Labour Party would stop them. Not only did the Labour Party not stop them; the average charge being talked about now is €2 higher than the rate the party promised to prevent being imposed. The party has retreated so far from the high moral ground it sought to occupy in 2011 that it is now boasting about having introduced a charge which it said it was totally opposed to in the first place.

The rate at which Fianna Fáil was planning to charge for water reflects the overall cost of the running of our water services. The average rate proposed by the Government would only cover half of that. It has said that the shortfall will be made up initially by subvention, taken either from the local property tax or the Exchequer. How will the costs be met in future years? Will the local property tax be used every year to prop up and support Irish Water and the monster it is becoming? It is already the case that the local property tax fund, which was meant to pay for local amenities such as footpaths, public lighting, libraries and parks - I have heard those words from Deputy Hogan, the Taoiseach and others on the Government benches countless times in the last two years - has been taken away from the local authorities and 85% of it, or €486 million, is being used to subvent Irish Water. In effect, for the first year at least, householders are paying two new taxes. The real average cost initially will not be an average of €240 but a combination of the two charges - the property tax and the water charges. Add them together and one arrives at the total figure that people will pay for this service.

The troika, with Fianna Fáil acquiescence, was looking for a charge of up to €500 or more to cover the full cost of providing water services for domestic and commercial users. The EU Water Framework Directive insists that this must happen. This State had a derogation since 1997 from the directive. Does that derogation still exist? Annexe 3 of Article 9 sets out that member states must conduct an economic analysis to determine the rate at which the cost of water supply and waste disposal be charged to households, agriculture and industry. Has such an analysis been conducted here? What findings did it come up with? I would suggest that such an analysis would provide a much more definite guide to what people will end up paying than the average suggested here today. The economist Richard Tol, writing in The Sunday Business Post, calculated that if the EU insisted that all of the cost of providing water services be accounted for through water charges, the average charge per household would be more like €560. How then can the Minister propose that the average charge of €240 per household, with a further €200 million in commercial rates, is adequate to pay for the overall cost of running Irish Water? This does not even take account of the millions in legacy debt which will be taken on by Irish Water, money which was borrowed in the past for the upkeep of water services.

The hangover from expensive PPPs is still there, including 30-year contracts brought in during the boom years at boom-time prices. I know the Government cannot do anything about that, but the legacy is still there.

Many people will be initially pleased by the promise that households will receive 30,000 litres free every year but the average household use, based on a family of four, is six times that figure. Given that the average rate charge for any usage above 30,000 will have to increase, many people will inevitably pay far more than the €240 suggested by the Minister.

Averages are a poor guide to anything. If one household is paying €120 while another pays €360, it makes an average of €240. That is the way it will be, but it is a meaningless figure that bears no relation whatsoever to what people are actually paying. That is what will happen with water charges. Some people, depending on the composition of their household and other factors, will end up paying vastly more than we are being led to believe.

I do not buy the claim from Labour that the so-called concessions they extracted are based on social justice. I accept there will be exemptions for people with medical conditions and a couple of other exemptions within narrow parameters. Outside of that, however, there are no indications as to where the burden will fall. Neither is there any indication of how the shortfall in charges and the absence of a standing charge will be made up. There are growing legions of people on low pay, including thousands of workers on zero-hour contracts. Some of them are not even getting the minimum wage because, although they may have been in a job for two years, they are told that they are training. They are still being paid €7 or €7.50 an hour, but employers get around it by claiming they are training. They are being trained to do the most menial jobs that a person could learn in half a day or, in some cases, half an hour.

There is no reprieve for the unemployed or those on low pay. Neither is there any reprieve for those struggling to pay mortgages. The shortfall will have to be made up by charging a higher rate, which is a key point that the Minister is not telling people about. There will be a higher rate for the quantity of water used that exceeds the free allowance. It is no more than a smoke and mirrors job. The Government is just moving the figures around and holding back until after the election.

We have seen promises before to exempt those on low incomes from bin charges, for example, but they were not kept. Under this Government, the experience of people is that once a new tax or cut is implemented the impact will become more, not less, as time goes on. The proposed waiver scheme is simply a ploy. It is a fig-leaf to get the Government parties, and particularly the Labour Party, through the election. Like the waiver scheme for waste collection, it will disappear, as it did in the counties where that existed previously.

For the past two or three weeks, Ministers have been at the Cabinet table discussing the pressure on the Labour Party rather than the pressure on households. That is what they have been debating in the corridors of Leinster House. The issue has not been the pressure on households or low-paid workers, but the pressure on the Government parties, particularly Labour, in the run up to the elections.

The figures are there. The Government is wasting €530 million putting meters outside front doors. The Tánaiste said that as there is currently a loss of water of about 40% in the system, the structure of the charging regime would encourage incentivised conservation. Somebody should tell the Tánaiste that the 40% is being lost out of the mains network. That is what all the engineers are saying. How will charging the householder at the other end of the system stop those leaks two or three miles down the road? How will that happen? I have never read such a statement in all my life.

Today, the Minister, Deputy Hogan, said there would be an additional €200 million over two years for Irish Water's capital investment to include a free first-fix scheme providing each household with a free fix of the first leak on a customer's water supply pipe. Irish Water will be outlining its proposed capital programme, subject to CER approval, in the coming weeks. Can the Minister tell me what that extends to? Is it 2 m of the pipe beyond the stop-cock? Is it as far as the front or back wall of a house? What exactly does that mean? It seems deliberately vague to me. People reading that today may feel happy but when they see what it actually means they will find that a very restrictive scheme is being put in place. It is a sop to soften any opposition to what is being done.

The cost of this includes €530 million on meters and €180 million setting up the corporate monster that is Irish Water, yet not one leak has been fixed as a result of that expenditure. There will be a call centre with hundreds of workers. As I understand it, 500 new staff are being employed in Uisce Éireann, some of whom will earn over €100,000 a year. That is on top of an existing local authority system. We already have the call centres. They are called Áras an Chontae or Áras an Chathair. Clerical, administrative and engineering staff are already there in the local authorities' water services, yet the Government has created a corporate monster which is being superimposed on those structures. It has turned local authorities into mere subcontractors to be hired and fired.

The councillors who will be democratically elected in a couple of weeks time will be give the number of a call centre to contact. Those are the facts of it. Up to now, councillors quite rightly had a direct input into making water services plans. Deputies could make representations to county managers. However, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour have joined hands together to set up a separate structure. In some other countries, water services have been taken back under the control of local authorities because this is a fragmented service. It cannot be managed centrally unless one injects huge amounts of money into a large bureaucracy. It is a fragmented service because every county has hundreds of water sources. The Minister of State, Deputy Perry, knows that coming from Sligo, while Deputy John Browne from Wexford knows it also. I know it is the case, coming from Laois-Offaly.

There are hundreds of small and large water schemes, which cannot be run centrally unless it is done by a huge bureaucracy. That is what the Government is creating but it should return control of water to reformed local authorities. That power should be given back to local authorities, rather than wasting money on meters and establishing Uisce Éireann. We need to fix the leaks.

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