Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I think the Minister should do so because if he thinks the fiasco and the outrage surrounding the issue of Irish Water has been bad to date, if he has got this wrong, he is in deep trouble. We are asking a very simple question. How is it that the census states there are 1.6 million principal private households and the Minister says there are only 1.3 million. How can that be? How is it that the Minister can say there are 300,000 fewer principal private households than the census shows and that somehow, mystically and magically, 300,000 households have disappeared since the census? It does not add up and neither do the references to holiday homes because they are accounted for by the gap between the 1.6 million and the 2.1 million. They are the multiple properties, the holiday homes, of which there are 400,000, but what the census says - God almighty, if we are not supposed to believe the census to be reasonably accurate - is that there are 1.6 million principal private residencies, not second homes and not holiday homes. The Minister will have to explain that. Otherwise he has got a €30 million hole in his mathematics.

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