Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is almost 12 months to the day since the Water Services (No. 2) Bill 2013 was introduced and flashed through the House. It sparked a walk-out by the Opposition in protest at the ham-fisted way in which the Government forced the legislation through. That stance has been justified by what has happened over the last 12 months. We have seen an outpouring of protest against Irish Water and the litany of disasters the company has been involved in, from the establishment costs and the cost of consultants right through to the way in which the metering programme has been introduced. In recent weeks we have discovered that the metering programme will cost €100 million more than was budgeted for in the Department. We have heard all sorts of lovely language from the Government about how that budget was projected, but the fact is that it will cost €100 million more.

It will probably cost even more than that. At the moment, metering involves picking the low-hanging fruit, to use a well-used phrase. Houses and properties are being metered where the infrastructure is easy to get at. The locations of stopcocks and connections are known and companies can just go in, stick on the meters and leave again. When they begin to get into metering houses where stopcocks are lost and they have to go digging along the side of a road for 40 or 50 meters to locate connections to install meters, we will see the costs spiral out of control. Donegal County Council installed 12,000 meters in its non-domestic water metering programme a number of years ago. It had to borrow €9.7 million to do it, which worked out at a cost of approximately €805 per meter. The Government's projected cost is approximately €300 per meter. There is a huge difference. When companies go across rural areas installing meters, costs will continue to spiral. That is just one example of the disaster that is Irish Water.

I was someone who felt that having a national utility to deal with water services made sense. It is a fact that the management costs built into local authorities for water services have been too burdensome and expensive. There are not enough people working on the ground within water services to be able to provide an adequate service, and local authorities were too top-heavy on the management side. I worked in water services for 16 years before I entered the House. If the people do not re-elect me, I will hopefully go back to work in water services. Water services have been starved of funding throughout the years. It sickened me to listen to Ministers and Government spokespersons talk about local authorities failing to invest in water services over the years. The reason local authorities did not invest in water services was that they were not allowed to. The Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government exerted control at every step along the way in the delivery of water projects across the State. Local authorities had a nominal role in prioritising projects, but if those priorities did not suit what the Department wanted, they were changed. The Department's sanction was required at every step along the road.

The first surveys for the treatment plant I worked in at Killybegs in County Donegal were carried out in 1972. The plant was opened in 1994, having been completed on the basis of a design to meet a 1991 level of capacity. That was because the Department of the Environment had held up the project at every step. The same thing happened with every other project Donegal County Council put forward. That is not the fault of local authorities; it is the fault of central Government. Instead of talking about the failure of local authorities to invest, the Government should talk about its failure to invest. Even when there was plenty of money during the so-called Celtic tiger boom times, investment was not stepped up to meet the mark. It did not step up to deliver for the citizens across the country.

I heard the Minister refer in his contribution earlier today to Bundoran, County Donegal, where raw sewage continues to flow into Donegal Bay. Killybegs is the same. The Government is in fact in breach of the urban wastewater directive in not having solved those problems by this stage. Money has yet to be sanctioned in respect of plants that were ready to go to tender and construction years ago. Irish Water has been there for a year and is supposed to have reviewed all the investment programmes, but it still has not sanctioned the commencement of the construction of those projects. I believe that is because they are being done as design, build and operate projects. The Killybegs, Bundoran, Glencolmcille and Convoy schemes are being bundled and will be handed out to a private contractor to deliver and operate on a maintenance contract for years into the future.

It is interesting to look at that in the context of the creeping privatisation that has already taken place. Veolia, a French multinational, operates three plants in Donegal at the moment. A number of years before I finished up on Donegal County Council, almost 50% of its budget for sewerage services in Donegal was going to that company to run three treatment plants for three towns. The rest of the county was managing on the same amount of money without adequate treatment. Severn Trent is developing a sewage treatment plant in Letterkenny. If Irish Water continues to exist, ComReg will demand that its service level agreements are put to competitive tender when they come up for renewal. Local authorities will be forced to tender for service level agreements against the likes of Veolia, Severn Trent and Celtic Anglian Water, which has been in the news recently with regard to NTR. The Government may decide not to privatise the whole thing, but private companies will be involved and they will get the best of both worlds. They will get regional or county-based service level agreements from Irish Water to provide water services without any of the responsibility or demand for investment while being paid by citizens through the nose, if the Government gets these charges through. These services could and should have been provided by local authorities over many years.

We have arrived today at a situation in which the Government is bringing through this legislation. It says it is because it has listened to people's concerns and responded to them. It says the charging system that was introduced originally through ComReg was cumbersome and difficult for people to understand.

People fully understood the charging system. They realised it was the thin end of the wedge and that once it had been established, charges would go in only one direction, namely, upwards.

Two weeks ago, when the momentous changes that resulted in this legislation were announced, the Tánaiste stated that water meters could become the friend of consumers and citizens. A friend that milks us and costs us more and more would be some friend to have. The Government's plan was to subvent Irish Water to the tune of €539 million for the next three or four years, after which the subvention would be removed and Irish Water would assume the full costs of water. This means the costs of metering, including unit costs of water, could only ever rise. Consumers cannot, therefore, make savings on the metering programme.

We were told throughout this process that there were large numbers of leaks on connections and 49% of the water produced in the water services was unaccounted for. The impression given by Government spokespersons was that this was the fault of individual citizens and households and the wastage in their service connections was the reason we are in the current position. The Minister told some of the truth today and may even have exaggerated the position a little when he stated that 10% of the national leakage level is attributable to service connections. The Government is spending €539 million and may spend another couple of hundred million euro to deal with 10% of the wastage problem.

Irish Water estimates that the metering programme will only deal with 6% of water wastage nationwide. Based on the two different figures I have cited, between 39% and 43% will be wasted on the mains, even after the Government has spent more than €540 million delivering a metering programme. This shows the folly of what the Government is doing and demonstrates that the investment should have been made in district metering and control. A meter on a bulk main supply on a street or estate will catch the wastage taking place on service connections. On the other hand, installing 100 half-inch meters on the connections into 100 houses on an estate, street or town will not fix one leak on the mains. Using the Minister's estimate, one will catch perhaps 10% of the unaccounted for water. Investment in district and mains metering and staff on the ground to detect and fix leaks is the only way to resolve the problem. These are the areas on which the Government should have spent money. If it had been serious about getting a national utility off the ground, it would have taken this approach as its starting point and rolled out the utility in that way. It may then have had a chance of persuading people to buy into the concept of a national utility.

Citizens have no faith in Irish Water. The company started on the wrong foot and the position has become steadily worse. Irish Water and the Government fear citizens. The Bill establishing Irish Water included draconian measures to deal with people who refused to register or pay water charges. People were asked to provide their children's personal public service numbers to avail of the water allowance for children. These measures were proposed because the Government did not trust citizens. All that was required was to include on the registration form a question asking how many children aged under 18 years resided in the household. Allowances could have been provided based on these figures and an appropriate audit, as it has been described, could have been done to deal with people found to be milking or cheating the system. Instead, the Government made a series of mistakes and established a company in which no one has any faith. For this reason, Irish Water should be disbanded, the metering and charging programmes should be cancelled and water should continue to be provided through local authorities. This would require the Government to provide the local authorities with the means to deliver the capital investment the system needs across the board.

On 19 November, the Minister stated there would be no call-out service or charge. Prior to his statement, there had been considerable negative publicity about the possibility that Irish Water would charge citizens a €188 fee per call-out. In response, the Government has decided to remove the entire call-out service. A person who suspects a problem with his or her water service will not be provided with any customer service if he or she calls Irish Water. Previously, when local authority staff received a call from a customer concerning a problem with the water system, they would visit the location, identify the problem and tell the customer how to address the problem. In County Donegal, when we discovered a leak on a connection we used to advise the householder that the problem was their responsibility but in most cases we would fix it if the customer was prepared to dig down to the source of the problem. The Government should have provided for this level of customer service when it started to roll out Irish Water.

The Minister's claim that we will have the cheapest water in Europe is a sham, as his claim that it will only cost €1.15 per week. The cheapest charge will be €3 per week because a single person household will receive a bill of €160 per annum. Even if one person households avail of the €100 water conservation grant, with which they can do as they please, they will still receive a bill for €160, while a two person household will receive a bill of €260.

According to the Minister, the provision for the holding of a plebiscite in section 1, will ensure that Irish Water is never privatised. While I am not fully up to speed with legal jargon, I am concerned by the use of the word "may" in this provision. The Bill states the Government "may" decide to hold a plebiscite if it decides to alienate the shares in Irish Water. As such, it does not require the Government to hold a plebiscite but leaves it to the Government of the day to decide whether it wishes to hold one. The wording appears to provide a means of circumventing the requirement to hold a plebiscite.

As previous speakers noted, the legislation can be repealed by any future Government, thereby removing the so-called protection it provides in this regard. The Government could have announced on 19 November that it would hold a referendum to insert in the Constitution a clause on public ownership of water. It would be a brave Government that would subsequently hold a referendum to repeal such a constitutional provision. The Government should have held a constitutional referendum to address the concerns people have raised on public ownership.

The reason we are debating this Bill is that citizens have no faith in Irish Water or the Government. Between 300,000 and 400,000 people have taken to the streets in recent months to oppose Irish Water. These demonstrations echoed with cries of opposition to the bank bailout and the savage budgets imposed in the past six years, including cuts in child benefit and to payments to young people with disabilities and lone parents. People also demonstrated on the streets for these reasons. The only way the Government can address these issues is to dissolve the Dáil and hold a general election to give people their say.

People have marched in such large numbers because the Government has failed to deliver the so-called democratic revolution about which the Taoiseach spoke on the first day of this Dáil when he also promised that everything would change. People have been sickened because everything and nothing changed. The rot started when the Taoiseach visited Davos in the Government's first year. Having argued in this Chamber that what was being done to Irish people was not fair and we were paying a debt that was not ours, the Taoiseach told the great and good of world finance gathered in Davos that we had all partied and shared the responsibility for the crash. This was exactly the opposite of what he was telling people at home and highlighted the cynicism that pervades politics in this country.

That started the rot because people were sickened by the cynicism of the Government and the political system. It has led to the crisis faced by political parties, which have seen their ratings tumble in the polls. The citizens of the country do not have any faith in the party system which operates in the Dáil and in the Executive which dominates the House and removes from it any independence. The only way this issue can be resolved, people can be listened to and the citizens of the country satisfied is by dissolving the Government, holding a general election and letting the people have their say on Irish Water.

See this speech in context