Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

If the Minister gives me the figures, we can debate it further.

The purpose of Irish Water, as the Minister says, is to invest and conserve. Certainly, on the basis of any assessment of the proposals that are before us, that will not be the case. Irish Water has been castrated in terms of its ability to borrow on the markets. It will simply be incapable of doing so because it will not have the financial base committed to previously when the Government originally talked about charging a family with two adult children €500. Obviously, pressure was exerted and the Government yielded to it, and rightly so. However, we are now in circumstances in which the Government is neither able to borrow, invest or conserve because there is no incentive to conserve. For all these reasons, I ask the Minister to consider the amendment. We are really asking him to consider an amendment to ensure the entity can never be sold although it should never have been set up in the first place.

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