Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Yes. Next week it will be 12 months since the original legislation was rammed through the House. Since then we have had a year of confusion and anger, and one scandal after another, with regard to Irish Water. That is fundamentally about one issue, namely, old politics and a Government using a huge majority to dismiss dissenting voices. There is an arrogance about a Government taking citizens for granted. There has been cronyism and, ultimately, a super quango that essentially will be paid for by citizens.

We are back here debating this issue because everything about the Irish Water fiasco has been flawed from the outset. I have said on several occasions, and I repeat, that Irish people do not like being taken for fools. They were told that the Bord Gáis partnership was designed to save money and they watched as the Minister eventually disclosed that he knew the costs would be sizable, namely, €90 million, with some of the usual suspects in the list of consultants. They knew they were being turned from citizens into customers, and they resented that. For many, it is the straw that will break the camel's back.

If there is one thing Irish people have learned about in the past five or six years it is debt. They know that if they allow themselves to become customers they will be responsible for repaying all the debt incurred in setting up the quango but also for all the money the quango will borrow into the future.

This issue has been mired in controversy from the outset and if the Government hoped that this Bill would dismiss that controversy, it is mistaken. It cannot keep dismissing the controversies which have not only undermined the confidence people have in Irish Water but eroded confidence in this Government.

There are more controversies yet to come to the fore, one of which is the circumstances around the awarding of the metering contract. There are major concerns about this issue, and understandably so. There is a question to be answered as to why the cheaper installation offered by Siemens was dismissed. We must have an answer to that question. Why did the Government choose to accept the more expensive option that required us to borrow from the National Pensions Reserve Fund, with massive interest costs?

We must also get answers to the questions regarding the awarding of the contract. The key date is June 2013. In a reply to a parliamentary question tabled on 12 June 2013 the then Minister, Deputy Hogan, confirmed that the end of June 2013 would be the closing date for bidders to apply to be considered for the metering contract. GMC-Sierra, company registration No. 530230, was one of the successful bidders. GMC-Sierra was awarded a metering contract but, and this is the key, the same company registration number, 530230, did not come into existence legally until 15 July 1013, 15 days after the closing date for bids.

How is it that an entity that did not exist when the deadline closed was awarded a contract? GMC-Sierra, a company Denis O’Brien is a vested party in, was somehow awarded a contract before it existed. To tender for the contract requires, under EU and Irish law, a certificate of tax compliance. How could an entity that did not exist in law get a tax clearance certificate? These questions need answering. They will not go away and are being routinely spoken about across social media and online media, most notably on broadsheet.ie.

What sits uneasily with people is the broader debt burden, particularly the Anglo Irish Bank debt, placed on people's shoulders. That same debt burden underpins all austerity measures, including Irish Water. People watched helplessly as Anglo Irish Bank debt was turned into sovereign debt, placing a noose around their necks for decades to come. Some €500 million will be extinguished each year from now up to 2018, €1 billion per year will be extinguished from 2019 to 2023, and from 2024 on, €2 billion will be taken out of circulation and destroyed.

In that context, imagine the anger that people feel about a company called Millington, owned by Denis O’Brien, which was established to buy Siteserv, a company that owed Anglo Irish Bank €150 million, which was sold to Denis O’Brien’s Millington by Anglo Irish Bank for just €45 million. This is a discount of €105 million and represents, essentially, €105 million lost to the State. Interestingly, €45 million was reportedly the lowest bid for the purchase of Siteserv, yet it was accepted. I want to hear answers, because these matters will not go away and are being talked about repeatedly online, on social media and on Twitter. It should be noted here that GMC-Sierra is a subsidiary of the aforementioned Siteserv. It gets murkier. There are suggestions that, contrary to best practice models, the legal firm Arthur Cox acted for the seller, Anglo Irish Bank, and the purchaser, Millington, during the transaction. If this is the case, it is another question that deserves an answer.

The Taoiseach keeps telling us that this is about more than Irish Water, and he is right. It is about people power. It is about people demanding what they demanded before the last general election. It is about people demanding a different, reformed type of politics. People are realising that we should not have been exposed to the debt burden placed on our shoulders, with 43% of the entire European banking debt absorbed by a country that has 1% of the EU's population. People wanted and expected the Government to respect households' economic limits. They expected the Government to spend wisely. The last thing they expected was a huge, inflated quango.

The date of 10 December will be an incredibly important one. I was on the march in mid-October and it was the highlight of my year. For the first time, I felt that sense of solidarity that we have needed to see since the crash happened, before the Government came into office, where we act as a people and as a Parliament in unison. When people took to the streets, as we walked along people asked why we had not done this before. The first time some Technical Group Members met representatives of the troika, we were told they thought everything was all right, that no one was out protesting and that the opinion polls looked different. The troika has now gone and it is a very different scenario. Protest matters, and we have certainly seen, in regard to Irish Water, that the protest has made a fundamental difference in terms of why we are here today. The Government has been forced to listen to the people. One of the slogans that day in Dublin in mid-October was that it is not the people who are in power that matter but the power that is in the people. It is certainly the power in the people when they act in solidarity. Serious attention must be paid to what I believe will be a large demonstration this day next week.

Things should have been done and will be done in the context of the legislation. I raised the issue of PPS numbers last January and it has come up several times since. It has been mentioned that 900,000 packs have been sent back. I asked a parliamentary question and the usual non-reply I received was that Irish Water could not distinguish between the packs that were filled in correctly and those that were sent back with the message that people did not want to be customers, or with details not filled in, or with slogans and so on. As they were not segregated, it is impossible to know how many of the 900,000 packs sent back were genuine returns. It is misleading to trot out that number when it is perfectly possible to find out how many people returned them in a way the Government regards as legitimate. We will debate another Bill in January after pre-legislative scrutiny. This issue will run and run, because it is about far more than Irish Water.

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