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

In the four years since then, we are after travelling a long distance. A Labour Party Minister came into the Chamber to present a scheme to get in water charges and impose another tax on householders. The Government is in crisis and has lost its mandate. Since the Government exited the bailout this time last year, it does not have the political cover provided by the troika for the pain it continues to inflict on low and middle-income households, which the Labour Party is supposed to be protecting.

Instead of that, we have relentless austerity. Throughout the year, the Government has limped from one disaster to another, all of its own making. It has squandered the opportunity to ease the burden and give low and middle-income families a break. It failed to do so in the budget and had another regressive budget. That is not the Sinn Féin line - the ESRI and other organisations have said so. There is a lot of talk about democratic revolution but there is little democratic revolution in the Dáil. The democratic revolution is on the streets and at the ballot box by ordinary people who say that enough is enough.

The water fiasco is the last straw. What the Government is proposing does little to give relief to citizens who cannot afford to pay and it shows the Government is refusing to listen and shows how far it is removed from public opinion. Public confidence in the so-called water reform process initiated by the Government has been nothing short of a complete shambles from start to finish. The promise to hold a plebiscite if and when it is proposed to privatise Irish Water is a distraction from the Sinn Féin proposal to hold a referendum on putting a guarantee in the Constitution that the water service cannot be sold off unless the people of this State so desire. The requirement to hold a plebiscite written into the current Water Services Act through amendment or in a new Bill, would be meaningless.

A future conservative Government intent on privatising Irish Water, as the current Government has done with parts of Bord Gáis, could simply amend the legislation and in that way avoid having to hold a plebiscite. The only way to safeguard against privatisation is to pass our Bill. If the Government is committed and on sure ground, it can put hand on heart and support our Bill over the next couple of days.

The new rates at which people will be billed in 2015 are only an introductory offer. The Labour Party started with Tesco-style advertisements before the last election but now we have a Tesco-style offer to get people to sign up and pay for water. Once they do, the charges will increase after four years, if we get that far. The clause related to affordability is meaningless as we do not know who will interpret it. We have been told it will be a Minister, but what affordability means to a Minister is different from what it means to somebody on €150 or €180 per week. The increase will not happen before the next election as the Government desperately seeks to save itself from a drubbing, but the economics of the way in which Irish Water has been established make it inevitable that the company will take in far more in water charges in the future than it will under current proposals. What is brought in under current proposals is a small proportion of the total required, with the difference made up by subventions. Approximately 10% of the cost of running Irish Water will be collected, and that is with the hope that most people will pay. I wish the Government luck with that, because, judging by what we have seen in recent months, it may not get that far.

I have pointed out on numerous occasions that the predictions being made by the Government regarding an average charge would end up being an underestimate. In August, the energy regulator announced new rates, with average charges of €275 for a two-person household and €483 for a four-person household, far above what was mentioned by the Taoiseach last January, February and March. We see that sands can shift, and by passing responsibility to the energy regulator the Government can keep the issue at arm's length. Government spokespersons will of course claim that the rates did not apply to a household of two adults and two children under the age of 18 who would be eligible for the allowance for children, but even the €240 average charge was wrong, as the total would have been €278 in the first year.

It is no coincidence that opposition to the water charges, which had always been there - as I informed the House during the debate on the Bill to establish Irish Water - increased greatly once people realised, following the regulator’s report, exactly how high their bills would be. The figures were €480 or €500 for a household with five adults.

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