Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This is not the case. I do not know whether the Deputy was ever in a trench himself having to deal with one of those things but, believe me, it is an experience.

For instance, we discussed the question of homelessness. What does one do with an issue that has been around for a long time? The point was that, in addition to the Cabinet sub-committees, which I chair myself, the Minister, Deputy Kelly, and the Minister of State, Deputy Coffey - this was reflected at some element of the EMC in the past - conducted the meetings with the NGOs on Thursday, the lord mayor on Friday, came to the Cabinet committee yesterday and brought their business before the Cabinet this morning, where it was endorsed and set out as a way of dealing with the principal priority of rough sleeping in Dublin and other cities - Cork, to a lesser extent Limerick, to a lesser extent Galway and so on - and then making arrangements as to how one is going to get the voided units renovated and fixed up so that they are suitable for individuals or for families, and the bigger build by providing proper housing through the expenditure of the €2.2 billion. That is what is involved there.

Deputy Boyd Barrett asked me if I would be out listening. There is a debate on homelessness in the Chamber tomorrow, obviously arising from the unfortunate tragedy across the road that needs to be dealt with. The Minister, Deputy Kelly, and the Minister of State, Deputy Coffey, are leading that. I hope to contribute to that debate at some stage, but I have listened to the people who came to my office. I have listened to the many people who protested and who rang up, some in not very polite language, I might say, or some who sent messages of a particular kind. In any event, what they did say was that they wanted clarity, they wanted certainty, they wanted to know about affordability, they wanted to know about the entity of Irish Water and it being retained in public ownership, and they wanted to know what was going to happen after 2019. All of those issues have been dealt with as fairly and as clearly and as definitively as can be by the Government. The cost, as the Deputy knows, for somebody who registers and gets €100 back is €1.15 per week for a single person or for a single person with children under 18 and €3 where it is two or more adults in the house, with children being free. There is no cut-off. There is no reduced pressure. The first leak is fixed. It is possible to beat the meter, unlike what Deputy Martin says, by being able to conserve water and understand it. Obviously, Irish Water will be retained in public ownership. Legislation will be drafted so that if some future Government were to say "We want to privatise it", it would have to go and have a referendum. Nobody is going to do that anyway. The last public entity that was sold was Eircom, and we saw what happened there with asset stripping over a period, which turned out to be a complete disaster. The Deputy knows who did that.

There is a situation that Deputy Boyd Barrett will understand. Across rural Ireland, water has been paid for for very many years. Some people have had to put in private wells. It might be €5,000 or €6,000 to bore a well - the pipes, the pumps, the chemicals, the salt and all of that.

See this speech in context