Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This is the second time in recent weeks that Ministers have sought to piggyback amendments to enacted legislation. What makes this more worrying is that the legislation the Minister of State seeks to amend here only passed the Dáil and Seanad a few short months ago, in effect.

Specifically on the amendments, one of the major questions is when the Minister Communications, Energy and Natural Resources will use his ministerial powers. The guidelines on media mergers have not yet been published. It is disappointing that the Minister believes it is appropriate to slip in amendments to the competition and consumer protection legislation in this manner. If the legislation is to be revisited, the debate should have begun at the start of the Bill's journey. I, for one, would have welcomed an opportunity to amend it in some key areas.

Section 19 of the legislation prescribes those organisations with which the new body will work. It does not, however, mention Irish Water. For hundreds of thousands of families across the State, Irish Water is toxic. Some are opposed to the commodification of water for logical reasons. Water is necessary for life and to commodify it puts a cost on one of the key inputs. Others are opposed to it because they simply cannot afford to meet another cost, charge and stealth tax. Regardless of the reasons people are opposed to water charges, they are united in their disgust at the manner in which Irish Water has conducted itself. The Government may believe it is going to pull it back from the brink, but, to be honest, nobody outside the House really believes that.

The Minister told us earlier this year that the Government had established a new governance model to manage, fund and deliver water services.We asked him who would independently stand up for the consumer in this reform process. He told us that the Commission for Energy Regulation, CER, would be the independent regulator for Irish Water and that it would have powers to direct the company to prepare a code of practice on any matter that it considered necessary and appropriate to secure the interests of customers. We warned that the CER was a regulator, not a consumer watchdog with real teeth to protect and vindicate consumer rights.

We raised a number of other concerns with the Minister and, in a manner true to form, the Government did not listen. Not listening is becoming the modus operandiof Fine Gael and the Labour Party in government. It is business as usual; the Government is literally carrying on the baton from the previous Government, with the same arrogance playing itself out. There is a disconnect on the part of the Government in dealing with the issue of water charges and how to address the antiquated water infrastructure in the State. The Government hides behind EUROSTAT figures, as if the construction of the company is something over which it has no control. The EUROSTAT figures are simply a method used by the European Union to force important utilities such as this to be separated from the state. The Government is obviously flying by the seat of its pants and its governing is becoming more chaotic day by day.

We also sought to amend the Competition and Consumer Protection Bill to address a deeply unjust ruling in 2004 by the Competition Authority on rates of pay for vulnerable workers in journalism and the entertainment industry. SIPTU and Equity had a collective agreement with the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland setting out minimum rates of pay, overtime rates and rest breaks for voice-over actors. In 2004 the Competition Authority ruled that this agreement was in breach of section 4 of the Competition Act 2002 as each actor was, in effect, a business. In real terms, this is nonsense. The authority deemed it unlawful for musicians, actors and journalists to have a right to collective representation by their unions. Further down the road SIPTU and the NUJ secured an agreement via the social partnership process on a legislative change to deal with this deeply unfair decision. However, the commitment was not delivered on by Fianna Fáil and the unions have had even less success with the Labour Party and Fine Gael - so much for the so-called Labour Party softening the hard edges of its right-wing coalition partner.In 2012 ICTU wrote to the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation seeking an exemption from the provisions of the Competition Act.In 2013 the Minister's officials told the unions that the troika was blocking the Government in exempting these workers from the provisions of competition legislation.

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