Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

With respect, if the Minister has some manners and humility, he will begin to listen, not just to me but also to the manifestation of the right to water on the streets of the capital city over one month ago which then spread to every village and town across the State. The the right to water campaign, in which Sinn Féin, with others, is proud to play a central role has two aims, one of which is to achieve a right to water - that is what the motion is about - and have it enshrined in the Constitution. The second is to have the water charges scrapped and the legislation repealed.

What Sinn Féin is doing with this Bill - Members on the Government side may call this opportunistic - is that it is listening to the will of the people and putting forward what it has been saying for many years - that water is and should be a right and should be protected under the Constitution. It should not be at the whim of the Government or the Labour Party to make another promise, which they will no doubt break in the future.

Is the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy White, asking us to trust the Labour Party in the same way it asked the public to trust it on the issue of university fees? Its members promised there would be no increase in university fees and went as far as having a photo shoot and signing a pledge. Should they now ask the public to trust them on the issue of water rights and public ownership, just as they asked the public to trust them on the issue of child benefit? That time, the Labour Party went as far as spending thousands of euro of its money erecting posters the length and breadth of the country pledging that the promise it was making would not be breached.

The problem for the Government, and for the Labour Party in particular, is that the public has lost faith, trust and confidence in it. The Minister says the Government is bringing in a legislative bind on the Dáil to ensure that Irish Water will not be privatised, but they told us that a couple of months ago. They said the legislation provided that it could not be privatised, but now they have acknowledged that the provision is not strong enough and are saying they will go for a double-lock provision. The same problem exists with the double-lock as with the first lock. It is legislation and any government can, at a whim, change the legislation of the day. The Government can put it into the legislation that Irish Water cannot be privatised in the future without a plebiscite, but a future government, or the existing Government under pressure from the troika or other forces, internal or external, could propose an amendment to that legislation that would remove the condition to have a plebiscite.

Let us get real about this. This is about taking the people for fools. The Government is trying to say it understands these matters and that inserting a condition to provide for a plebiscite will protect Irish Water, while hoping the public does not understand that with the snap of a finger it can change the law, if it so wishes, through a majority vote in the Seanad and the Dáil.

The core of this issue is whether water should be protected under the Constitution. I said in my opening remarks, and we acknowledge this, that the Minister is clearly under pressure on the issue. Half of the Labour Party believes water should be protected under the Constitution, while others, particularly those promoted to the ministerial benches, believe it should not, or perhaps it is just that they have to toe the line on Fine Gael policy.

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