Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is no answer to the fundamental point I am making about €500 million. We are also paying for the construction of a billing infrastructure which is not needed. We have a regulator that will not be regulating. What was the role of the regulator in all of this over the last month? The regulator was not even mentioned in the newest iteration. The charge on which the Government continues to obstinately insist will bring in a paltry amount at the maximum possible cost. It will spend a fortune to bring in negligible revenue. At less than 0.3% of the general government budget deficit, it shows an almost perverse insistence on maintaining a policy which not only has no public legitimacy but will also continue to cause serious damage. The net effect of the latest Government policy will be the diversion of scarce resources from vital public services in order to fund Irish Water’s work.

The only credible policy is to call a halt to Irish Water and scrap the charges in order to stop the damage now, rather than wait for the inevitable final climb-down next year. Today was supposed to be about drawing a line under the issue; all it has done is keep it going. From the very beginning the Government has tried to claim there was no alternative to this policy. It said it was the only way to get essential funding and to improve services. That was false when the policy was announced and it has been proven false to the extent that even the former Fine Gael Minister of State with responsibility for this policy has described it as an unmitigated disaster. Has any Member of Government met Deputy O'Dowd to discuss this? Did the current Minister, Deputy Kelly, meet him? Was he asked to elaborate on why he believes the policy was an unmitigated disaster?

This is no accidental shambles. It is not an unexpected policy error. The establishment of Irish Water and everything it has done was set out by Fine Gael before the general election. It is one of the longest established and most detailed parts of Fine Gael policy and it was incorporated in full in the programme for Government in spite of the Labour Party’s pre-election promise to veto it. The Tánaiste neglected to mention the Tesco ad or the clear promise that her party would stop Fine Gael from doing this. That promise evaporated within a day of the election. There was nothing in the troika agreement that obliged the Government to proceed as it has done, and in any case it is now over a year since the Government began its three-month celebration of the conclusion of that agreement.

The scale and intensity of public resistance to Irish Water and these charges has been clear since Deputy Barry Cowen began forcing the former Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government and Irish Water to answer specific questions about their work. What was supposed to be a low-cost, highly effective entity was exposed as a highly wasteful and ineffective bureaucracy offering indecent bonuses and focused primarily on creating an infrastructure for charging people for water rather than delivering clean and reliable water supplies. The particular intensity of the reaction is not solely because of the charges or the waste at Irish Water; it is because of the cumulative impact of Government policy. As every independent study has confirmed, the only decisive shift in policy when Fine Gael and the Labour Party came to office was that their budgets were significantly more unfair and regressive. From day one their policy has been to place a larger burden on those on middle and lower incomes. The one consistent part of their policy has been to ignore the ability of people to pay when introducing or extending taxes and charges. This was combined with non-stop spin about how, contrary to the evidence, people should thank them for being fair and visionary. That is why the water charges became the last straw. An unfair and wasteful policy was constantly sold as progressive and visionary. Of course people were going to be alienated and they were not going to stand for it. The protest of people was seen in their votes in the local elections and has been unmistakable since then.

Even though some candidates and parties have tried to exploit the issue, there is a genuine, widespread and entirely legitimate public opposition to this policy. The aggressive behaviour seen on some protests in the past week does not reflect the broad mass of the public. There are some who cynically want to be in democratic assemblies while at the same time pretending to be outside them. Members elected to this House do not need a bullhorn to be heard. However, the behaviour of the Minister, Deputy Kelly, undermines the legitimacy of this Parliament and, unfortunately, the legitimacy of the point I am making. If the Minister and the Government treat the House with contempt, they give fuel to the argument that people are better off protesting outside. I hope the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste will take that on board. There is nothing peaceful about trapping someone in her car for two hours. There is nothing democratic or legitimate about harassing public officials as they carry out their public duties. In this country there are more than enough opportunities for people to have their voices heard without resorting to aggression. Nobody who participated in any of the actions which have rightly been deplored can say there was no alternative. If certain political parties were genuinely sincere about supporting the public’s outrage on this issue rather than trying to exploit it for their own ends, they would allow local voices and people who are members of no party to be heard more, rather than looking for opportunities to promote their own candidates.

At the core of this shambles of a policy is Fine Gael’s NewERA policy, which was first launched in 2009. This policy introduced the idea of placing services into commercial holding companies and funding investment through a combination of charges and the sale of State assets. As we have seen in relation to gas supplies and our forests, a creeping privatisation agenda has been implemented from the Government’s first days in office.

There has been no recognition that, for a small and peripheral country such as Ireland, the impact of commercial monopolies in public services could prove disastrous in terms of both costs and services. There has been a refusal to commit to the long-term future of maintaining State assets. As it stands, there is no investment case for Irish Water. There is no water quality case for Irish Water. There is no fairness case for Irish Water. All we have is a wasteful and damaging quango which should be abolished before it does more damage and wastes more public funds.

It is obvious that there has been a consistent policy of giving Bord Gáis preferential treatment in this matter. The only independent review of policy the Government allowed, which was carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers, explicitly recommended against attaching Irish Water to Bord Gáis. The review found that such an approach would be wasteful and inefficient and set out 17 disadvantages of proceeding as planned. The Government chose to proceed anyway. We also know that the Government worked to withhold for as long as possible details of the costs associated with Irish Water and excluded other potential operators without detailed consideration. Why was the Fine Gael Party, in particular, so eager to put Irish Water under the control of Bord Gáis? Why did it move so quickly to do so and why has it spent so much time defending its decisions? The Irish people are owed an explanation of where the ideas for the NewERA approach came from and what discussions were held by Fine Gael with Bord Gáis before and after the general election. With whom did the former Minister, Phil Hogan, consult before drawing up this particular proposal? I would like answers to those questions.

Our system of water supply needs investment; nobody is questioning that. However, it is absolutely untrue to say there was no investment in the past and that there can, moreover, be no investment without first establishing Irish Water and introducing charges. As Deputy Barry Cowen pointed out, more than €5 billion was invested in water services between 2000 and 2010, bringing substantial improvements in our water supply system and to wastewater treatment plants across the country. That should be acknowledged. Reference was made to the 1,000 jobs being created by Bristol-Myers Squibb. That company would not establish a pharmaceutical plant here if it did not have confidence in our public water utility system. The same is true of the various pharmaceutical plants that set up here in the past decade. I know this because I was Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment for some of that period. The reliability of water services never featured as a negative for any company looking to set up here. Let us have balance and perspective in this debate instead of the Government's attempts to over-egg the pudding and rescue itself from the mess it has created.

From day one we have pointed out that a policy of "Fix it first" was the only way to proceed. This is truer now than ever. The case for Irish Water falls apart when one considers that most of the planned improvement work for the water network is to be undertaken by the existing structures. Under the current plans, it is the water services staff of local authorities who will deliver the improved service that has been promised. Irish Water's principal activity is the construction of a method for metering and billing, and its only significant contracts and investments relate to that function. Irish Water in itself will do nothing at all to improve water quality and supply. The proposals in regard to the situation in Roscommon are another fig leaf, as measures were already in train before Irish Water was even established. In fact, Irish Water will divert significant public funding from other services.

There was a time when the Government intended to raise €300 million per year in charges and take €500 to 600 million off the general Government balance and general Government debt. It was argued that this would free up money for other services, but that is no longer the case. While the formal decision on how the debts of Irish Water are treated will be made by EUROSTAT next March, today's announcement raises questions as to whether the accounting exercise trick being deployed will actually work. EUROSTAT needs to cop on and the Government needs to cop on, because they are fooling nobody with this type of stuff. What we are talking about here is the Irish people's debt. It is a bit like what happened when research and development was magically reclassified by EUROSTAT and, lo and behold, the deficit was reduced by €2 billion, just like that. That type of thing undermines confidence in official statistics, and the type of accountancy trick we are seeing here is in the same genre. If we want people to have faith and confidence in European institutions and how we do our business, we must sort this out. Nobody is fooled by the reality behind these figures. If the investment remains and the charge remains capped, the shortfall will have to come from somewhere. It will have to come from Government funding and, therefore, it will be accounted for in the normal public finances. That means money coming from other services. A backfiring accountancy trick is nothing new from a Government that refuses to do even basic long-term planning.

One of the most appalling aspects of this shambles is that huge public funding will continue to flow into the programme of water meter installations even though there is no need for those meters. Contracts for €500 million have been signed. Given the scale of investment needs in our economy, is it not close to obscene that the installation of meters will eat up funding that should be going into improving vital services? Nobody on the Government side has addressed that question in any shape or form. The Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, spoke about legacy. It may well be that the legacy emanating from today's announcements will be €500 million wasted and no measurable benefit whatsoever for anybody.

Today's package has been put together in a panic and will not last. It leaves in place charges for a failing service and entrenches the position of Irish Water. Instead of putting in place the most complex system of charging for water ever invented for the sake of a paltry amount which will be collected at great cost, the proposals should be scrapped and the Government should go back to the drawing board. Irish Water should be scrapped immediately. It has no substantive role to play and is fatally defined by the arrogance and hubris of those who established it. We do not need a company like this. It is not required to improve services and increase efficiencies. Its primary purpose was always to make it fit for privatisation. Fine Gael and the Labour Party were wrong to establish it and Sinn Féin was wrong last September when it called for it to be retained. Given the latter party's obsession with what Deputy Gerry Adams calls "electoralism", it is no surprise to see that its policy has changed, just as Deputy Adams changed his own position in regard to whether and where he would pay the charge.

As my party has pointed out, the alternative is to establish a different type of public utility. We have had successes in this regard, such as with the National Roads Authority. That type of utility format accommodates greater regional co-ordination and investment and helps to avoid the commercial mentality that has given us the bloated bonus culture and the focus on billing that we have seen at Irish Water. This Government refused to listen to the Opposition on 19 December last year when the Water Services Bill was rammed through the House in less than four hours. The Government refused any amendments and even refused to listen to the concerns and worries of its own backbenchers. It is now reaping the rewards of that bull-headedness and arrogance. We have seen a massive climb-down by the Government today, within 11 months of its Bill being voted through the Dáil by those same backbenchers. What is proposed is a masterpiece in failure. The pause button should be pressed before any more taxpayers' money is wasted.

The Government has yet to explain what incentives will be available to encourage people to conserve water or how much they will invest in infrastructure. We have had no detail on any of this for more than 12 months. All we have had is the Taoiseach bandying about figures of €10 billion and €20 billion.

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