Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

We were all a little bit disappointed last week that the Tánaiste was not here to answer questions on the dramatic departure of the former Minister for Justice and Equality only hours after his ringing endorsement of him. Having listened to his response to Deputy McDonald the idea that he is almost taking pride in his total lack of involvement or supposed knowledge of one of the biggest crises in the history of An Garda Síochána is, to me, absolutely astounding, but we will deal with this later when discussing the Guerin report.

I wish to raise an issue which affects every citizen in the State, and one on which the Tánaiste made his political name through his opposition to water charges. The Tánaiste is no doubt aware that last week Irish Water issued an instruction to all of its contractors to withdraw from the installation of water meters in working class estates and to retreat to the more affluent suburbs where they were less likely to meet resistance, a resistance which was growing and active in Cork and Dublin, no doubt in a vain hope the electorate would forget about this issue. When the canvassers are gone, the posters are taken down and the recycling bins have been emptied of all of the leaflets homeowners will be faced with another bill when they cannot even meet the ones they have in the first place. Not just this, but they face the obscenity of footpaths continuing to be dug up to install water meters against the backdrop of a 40% reduction and leakage of expensive treated water, when the same crews, with extra people, could dig up the same streets to repair the network. This is nothing short of high order environmental vandalism.

When the Tánaiste's colleague, the Minister, Deputy Howlin, was Minister with responsibility for the environment in the 1990s he brought out a KPMG report on the financing of local government in Ireland. It is a good read and I have it here. It made the point that domestic water metering was an uneconomic proposition and that water should be funded from central taxation, and so it was decided that local authorities could keep the funds from the motor tax, a source of revenue which has increased four times. We kept paying it but the Government decided to pilfer the account to pay the national debt. To add insult to injury this is being dressed up as a conservation measure. Is it not the case that water charges have nothing to do with the funding of water services but are in fact another tollbooth on public services to pay for the national debt?

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