Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

What is the gain here in that case? What are we getting out of this apart from one thing that always happens. I am willing to admit I saw it happen when we were in government. There is a thinking in officialdom, which will wait 50 years to get its way eventually. I see it doing things with this Government that were tried a few times with me, although I said "No". Officialdom will keep coming until it gets somebody to do the thing it wants done. There is somebody in officialdom who was there in our time who wants a metered system of water.

They will allow the figure to be written down to virtually zero because they take the long view that once the system is in place, they will be able to chip away at it until they reach their objective of full cost recovery.

Slogans are dangerous and I do not agree with the slogan, "We have paid for water". If we have paid for water, we have not paid for something else because the Exchequer returns for the first ten months of 2014 show that, after setting aside interest and loan repayments, we still spent more on direct services than we took in taxes. Clearly, there are costs that we are not covering and must borrow money to meet. We should analyse the figures and arrive at a realistic and fair conclusion.

I hear another argument about broadening the tax base. Unless one plans to tax people outside the State, broadening the tax base means rearranging the chairs because one must still take money from the same group of people, namely, the residents of the State. What then is being broadened? Normally, broadening the tax base means introducing different taxes to complicate people's lives when it would be easier to have fewer taxes. Having examined documentation produced by the Department of Finance, I believe there is a subtext to the argument for broadening the tax base. The whinge from the Department is that too many people do not pay income tax. This overlooks the fact that people who do not pay income tax pay VAT and excise on petrol, beer and so forth. It appears that those who are paying income tax - a fair number of people in the system pay handsome amounts of income tax - believe one of the ways of lessening the burden on them is to introduce a large number of new taxes that everyone will have to pay. If that is what is taking place, we must be honest about what is meant by broadening the tax base. Let people argue that the top guys are paying too much and the bottom guys are not paying enough. Let those who believe that is the case call it as such.

Increasing the number of piddly little taxes, of which a tax generating €100 million is one, is an irrational system for collecting money. When I was a member of the Government I used to hear a great deal about €100,000 being wasted here or there and I always tried to put such figures in context. To put the figure of €100 million in context, let us take the example a household with a net after tax income of €50,000. If this household were to devise a plan to save €1 per annum, one would not believe it was doing much to save money. If it were to produce a complicated, money in and money out plan to save €100 per annum, one would conclude that the savings achieved would not do much for the family economy. The Government spends €50 billion annually. The figure of €100 million from water charges is exactly the same proportion of overall Government expenditure as a saving of €100 would be for a family with a net income of €50,000.

My conclusion is that while the Government may not have a long-term plan, somebody in Merrion Street is taking the long view. A long time ago, Charlie McCreevy made the same comment in respect of Europe's view on corporation tax. The officials in Merrion Street will wait forever because it is in their minds to go the full hog and charge the full economic cost, not only in terms of water in but also of water out.

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