Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the motion brought forward by colleagues in the Technical Group and I extend my party's support for it. If those in Government imagined that the campaign against domestic water charges had been holed below the watermark or was on the wane, they would have got the message last Saturday when people came onto the streets of Dublin in their tens of thousands to say emphatically to Government that we demand the abolition of domestic water charges. We do not want their reduction or mitigation but their abolition. We wish to see water secured as a human right and the provision of water services to be a public good, secured within the Constitution, while the monster that is Irish Water has to go.

These are not new messages but they have been reiterated time and again. The Government has sought to give the impression that it has listened to the people. It has not. I had wondered for a long time how the Government could be so astray on this issue but last night and yesterday the Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, and colleagues from the Labour Party answered that question for me. The Minister described those of us who argued against water charges and, by extension, every person who stands against water charges as enjoying failure, wallowing in victimhood, imagining that there is a utopia in which everything is free. He categorised us all as people who believe we can have everything we want for absolutely nothing. The absolute cheek of him. What a cheap and nasty depiction of working people and their families the length and breadth of this country.

The Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, and his colleagues have demonstrated just how craven and cheap the Labour Party has become and the contempt in which they hold working people who know the value of €650,000 squandered on an advertising campaign and €85 million squandered on consultants and, furthermore, who know the value of more than €500 million on water meters. That was their money, their money.

I say again, in support of this motion, that abolition of these charges is what is needed and demanded, and that demand has not gone away.

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