Dáil debates

Thursday, 11 December 2014

Water Services Bill 2014: Committee Stage (Resumed)

 

4:35 pm

Photo of Peter MathewsPeter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is a week short of a year from when the primary legislation was forced through the House, effectively without any debate. Instead we have had this debate yesterday and today and perhaps we will have it tomorrow. This is a good debate but it should have happened a year ago. Various analyses and considerations are being discussed, as is the genesis of Irish Water and whether there should be a central utility for water charges. The saddest moment I witnessed this afternoon was when the Minister shook his head and then nodded when Deputy Shortall brought to his attention the issue of whether there was a derogation from European law whereby we did not have to establish this massive Titanic. By that head-nodding the Minister indicated this has been forced on our people and this is wrong.

There are four elements to life, namely, fire, air, water and earth. Our country's shoreline is owned by the State as a matter of constitutional reality. Water and its distribution to the citizens of the country should be in the ownership of the State, the people of Ireland, and it should be well managed as such. It might be managed on a locality basis, as it has been to date, and funded through central funding as well as some local funding. To do what is being forced upon us at present is entirely wrong and it arises because there has not been a proper understanding of what has happened in this country since the year 2000 and the turnover into the new millennium. Even the make-up of our population has changed. We have in our population now Irish citizens who came from other countries such as Poland, China and Lithuania. In the year 2000, I worked in Lithuania and there were hardly any Lithuanians in Ireland that year. Since then approximately 70,000 have come. We also have Latvians, Estonians and an increasing number of Africans and Indians. This shows how our country has changed.

We had a financial collapse as a result of complete dereliction from any responsibility by banks after creating a credit pyramid bubble which left the country with a national debt of €230 billion and private household debt which is suffocating many families. Approximately 100,000 mortgages are in deep distress and families comprising approximately 350,000 souls are imprisoned in their homes, which are being financed by loans they received in the past which were too big. What the Government terms the two pillar banks are drawing blood from these people. They are supposed to be utilities for the financial bloodstream of domestic family life, business life and small and medium enterprises. These institutions are no more behaving like proper healthy utilities then the man on the moon. We see this in the correspondence we receive in our offices.

This debate on sections and amendments to a Bill which is trying to half unwind a crazy idea is meaningless. We are being invited to speak about the arrangement of the deckchairs and internal fit-out of some of the rooms on the Titanic. We should not even be on the Titanic. The State, to provide the medical, security, police, army, educational, teacher, university and lecturer services needed in a society, needs to be funded from revenues which it fairly earns and are not just dreamt up at the point of crisis by unelected bureaucrats on the mainland of Europe. Most of our parents and their friends died for Europe's liberation in the Second World War, as did our grandparents in the First World War. We have not even had a break from the imposition of the losses in our economy which derived from the crazy funding of a crazy and fraudulent pyramid scheme by financiers who have disappeared into the sunset.

The property tax, as Deputy Shortall pointed out, is regressive for a huge swathe of those who must pay it. Many pensioners must pay huge amounts when their incomes and pensions may have fallen. As initially designed, the water charge is the same. It is completely regressive with regard to the incomes of the people who must pay it. Two massive bureaucracies are being created to try to administer something which is badly designed and should not even be in place.

People who are employed or who work as a sole traders or unincorporated businesses, and small and medium incorporated businesses which produce goods and services and export them, produce the incomes out of which the State can rightly and justifiably ask those individuals and companies to contribute to pay for the services it provides. This is where the thinking should begin and not with this lurched approach of knee-jerk reflex to widen the tax base. The Government is not widening it at all. The bills, invoices and notices of assessment must be paid out of income. Deputy Shortall explained that the gross earnings of 1 billion people are less than €25,000 a year. The Government is placing property tax and prospective water charges on them when their incomes have fallen and their other expenditures have increased. The foreign direct investment multinational corporations, which tell us what they earn in their reported profits, have shown no decreases in net incomes in the period under review.

On the correction to the difference between revenues and expenses of the State since 2009, Deputy Cowen is correct that €20 billion of the €30 billion, two thirds, was achieved before the present Dáil. Again the thinking has been reactionary or knee-jerk responses to bureaucrats on the mainland Continent of Europe, which was liberated by our parents and their friends, who in many cases were wounded and in some cases lost their lives in the liberation of the land where those bureaucrats were educated and are telling us what to do for our national recovery. There is something not good about that.

There is something not good about the fact that with a massive majority on 9 March 2011, the Government could not have put together a team with double the numbers of those who represented our people and gone to Frankfurt and Brussels to make the case. There was woolly thinking then. There was timidity. There was gutlessness and there remains gutlessness about those losses from our crazy pyramid-based banking funding from 2001 through to 2008. None of the directors of those banks, whether they were Irish-owned or foreign-owned, has been asked to explain how they arrived at the policies to expand their funding base in crazy financial engineering to create that asset price bubble.

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