Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The cost of repairing, reconditioning and reinstating the water system has been estimated to be approximately €10 billion. When one subtracts this amount from €25 billion, one is left with €15 billion for further capital infrastructure and to support and underpin the social protection of people who have been marginalised. Seven hundred children have no homes tonight, 40 homeless people will sleep on Grafton Street, 90,000 people are on housing lists waiting for accommodation and teachers and nurses are doing double jobs to pay their bills.

We are setting up large and costly infrastructure for local property tax and water charges when we live in perhaps the best served country in the world in terms of steady rainfall throughout the year. If the infrastructure for reservoirs, treatment plants and pipes were to be brought up to date at a cost of €10 billion, which money can be taken from the €25 billion I propose to tear up in Professor Honohan's office, we would not need meters or conservation because we have steady rainfall throughout the year. This year, despite exceptionally good weather, the rainfall level would have been sufficient to meet the water requirements of industry, agriculture and households if our water infrastructure had not been clapped out because it has been allowed to rot in the ground for the past 25 or 30 years.

There is an unfairness in this country and the progressive nature of these new charges, which require large bureaucracies to measure and bill, is wrong. We should use our imagination. All State expenditures, whether for hospital services, teachers, the Garda or anything else, come from only three sources, namely, personal incomes, corporate incomes and expenditure taxation such as VAT and customs and excise duties. One can give a tax a new name or describe it as a water charge or property tax but it will still be a tax on personal incomes. The Government has been gutless and afraid to put a bill in front of the corporates, whose incomes since 2008 have remained steady in nearly all cases or increased. It has been afraid to ask them to help in the national recovery effort. A bill of 2.5% of their reported declared profits would generate €2.2 billion per annum and would have generated €6.6 billion in the past three years. The Government should be ashamed of itself. We are all on the same side.

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