Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Cowen for tabling this motion. A total of 750,000 people in the country, that is one in six, live below the poverty line. Hundreds of thousands more are struggling just barely above that line. The population as a whole has been battered by year after year of austerity, cuts, charges and impositions of all sorts, both covert and overt. Against this background the least that people are decently entitled to expect is that where the Government establishes a body, regardless of what type of body it is, to impose another charge on these battered taxpayers, the interaction between this body and the taxpayers who will be charged should be clear, transparent and coherent. Deputy Fergus O'Dowd, among others, has told us, and we do not have to take his word for it because we see it every day, that Irish Water is acting in a way which is the polar opposite of this transparency, accountability and openness.

8 o’clock

It is opaque, distant and even disinterested.

I will give the House some examples of my interaction with Irish Water to illustrate what I am saying. Some time ago I telephoned Irish Water with a simple query. I am lucky enough to own a second house in Limerick and I have it converted to use as a constituency office. I wanted an answer to the simple question as to how that is treated for water tax purposes. Is it in the same category as a holiday home? Is it an unoccupied building? What is it exactly? The gentleman who answered said, "Well, Deputy, that's a very interesting question, but I can't answer it. I'll have to put you on to somebody higher up". He duly put me on to somebody higher up and the reply I got from the somebody higher up was, "Well, Deputy, that is a most interesting question, but we don't have the answer to it. I'll have to put you further up again". So I went up and up; I almost finished on the roof. Eventually when I got to the key man he told me - guess what - "That's a very interesting question. I don't have the answer, but give me your mobile phone number and I'll ring you back within the hour". That was five weeks ago and I have not heard a word back from that man since.

Undeterred by my failure in that regard, because of countless constituents who have queried why they need to submit their PPS numbers, I contacted Irish Water again with a simple question. Why do people, for example, those who are being assessed and who know what their liability will be, have to submit their PPS numbers? As a matter of fact, why do I, as a citizen, have to submit my PPS number? I got straight through to the top on this occasion, I am glad to say. The gentleman's first response was shameless blackmail. He said, "You go and tell your constituents that if they don't give their PPS numbers, they won't get their allowances". I reminded him that was not the question I asked him at all; I wanted a clear rationale for why people had to submit their PPS numbers. He went into an explanation and to my amazement I could not understand the language he was speaking. After a while I figured it out; it was a variant of the English language, called incoherent gibberish. I would have been better off if the man had been talking Swahili because then I would know why I did not understand what he was saying. George Orwell said that the function of political language is often "to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". If that is the case, the function of the language of Irish Water is to give the appearance of pure balderdash to - well - pure balderdash.

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