Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing my time with Deputy Paul J. Connaughton. I am glad to have an opportunity to contribute to the debate. There has been a great deal of discussion about Irish Water over the last number of days and months, and it is good to have two full days of debate in the House to assess the decisions the Government made yesterday.

It is important to record the thinking as to why Irish Water is important, necessary and the right structure to deliver water into the future. Those who say we should simply dismantle Irish Water and go back to the way things were must understand that the way things were resulted in a fundamentally broken water system. It resulted in a situation in which 20,000 families are on boil-water notices, raw sewage is going into rivers or the sea in 42 towns, and 48% of water leaks from pipes before it even gets to its destination. That is the record of the system to which many people wish to revert. The idea that we can simply invest public money to plug the leaks, go back to a situation in which 34 local authorities are all doing their own thing with regard to water and everything would be fine is naive at best. We would not know where all the leaks were if we did not have a metering system. It is impossible, regardless of available resources, for 34 different local authorities doing their own thing on water with no connection to each other to provide a consistent, sensible and seamless system across the country. Irish Water will not only have to provide safe, clean and affordable water to people's homes locally, but will also have to move very large volumes of water from one part of Ireland to another in future to deal with the particular and growing water consumption demands of the Dublin area.

The thinking behind Irish Water came originally from a strategy called NewERA, which was about looking at all of the State's assets, as well as State companies and their assets, and deciding what the State should keep strategic ownership of. It also examined the idea of selling some of the things we did not have a strategic ownership interest in to raise money to build the new infrastructure that the State would need to own in the future. That is where Irish Water as a concept came from, and it was the right one. We had a broken system and are trying to fix it. We are replacing 34 different local authorities with responsibility for water management with a single utility or entity that can benefit from economies of scale and borrow the significant sums of money needed to pursue the short and medium term capital investment programmes that Deputy Cowen rightly said yesterday were needed. That is something that Irish Water can do but that local authorities could never accomplish.

People need to understand that the thinking behind Irish Water was for all the right reasons. It was simply about trying to give people clean, safe and affordable water. It was about putting a delivery in system place to do that which could borrow substantial sums of money to replace pipes that in this city alone are often over 100 years old. When people talk about wanting to scrap Irish Water, they should at least suggest an alternative that does not involve going back to the broken, failed system we had until a year ago. That is what I am hearing that people want to go back to. We were paying €1.2 billion each year for a system that fundamentally was not working.

The thinking behind Irish Water was right, but its implementation was a mess. I and others in government have accepted that and been hugely frustrated by it. There was confusion and delays in decision-making at regulatory level and within Irish Water, and the result was huge concern and fear about the charges that people would be asked to pay. As a result, the public were rejecting in large numbers what was proposed by Irish Water and the Government. There was a need for a fundamental rethink as a result, and that is what happened yesterday. It was something the Government did not rush, and we were criticised for not doing it a month ago. We took our time, led by the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Alan Kelly, who was supported by his Cabinet colleagues. We are now trying to put a much simpler system in place, having listened to what many, many people have been saying to us about their frustration and anger. We have got rid of the need for PPS numbers for registration and have a put in place a system that will be supervised and independently certified for deleting those numbers from Irish Water's records. We are standing down the board of Irish Water and there will now be an oversight board from Ervia to look at our gas and water networks in future. We are getting rid of decisions on bonuses in Irish Water, delaying the start of the billing period and introducing a fair and affordable charging system for households. We have got rid of threats to turn down the pressure on water into people's homes and dealt with other issues that people have been raising. The idea that the Government is out of touch does not add up when one looks at the changes we made yesterday to address what people have been concerned about and have asked us to change.

Despite the commentary by some in the House and outside, the charging system we have now is not a flat-rate charging system. We have put caps in place so that a single adult in a house, regardless of how many children are there, will pay no more than €60 a year. As long as he or she draws down the €100 that is available from the Department of Social Protection, he or she will pay no more than €1.15 per week for water into the future.

If he or she is lucky enough to have a meter, and uses it, the payment could be lower. Some 500,000 meters have been installed and the number is growing week by week. A person who lives alone and uses less than 43,000 litres per year will pay less than €60 per year. A household with two children which uses less than 85,000 litres of water per year will pay less than €60 per year. The point of attack which I heard from Fianna Fáil Deputies and their leader yesterday suggested water meters are irrelevant. They are far from irrelevant. They pinpoint where the leaks are and allow households to pay less than the cap that is being introduced, as long as they conserve water in a responsible way.

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