Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will paraphrase Martin Luther King when he said that if a law is unjust then citizens have a duty to oppose it. That is the case with the imposition of water taxes on the citizens of Ireland. It is not only that the tax is unjust per se, in that it is a double taxation, but it is also the view held by very many of the protesters that the policies pursued by the Government are also unjust. The campaign against water taxes is a culmination of the widespread opposition to the household charge, the property taxes and the insistence by the Government that the Irish people must pay and be responsible for the financial crisis that has engulfed them over the past seven years.

What enrages people even more is that the Government insists on trying to intimidate them into complying with this tax. The Government may have been successful with the property tax but I believe it will not get away with its campaign of intimidation about the water taxes.

The people have seen through the Government's lies and diversions about the need for Irish Water and the imposition of charges and they know that in years to come, the tax will only increase, leading to bills of many hundreds of euro for citizens across the State. The announcement in the past days by a Minister that he intends to bring forward legislation to fast-track court appearances for people who refuse to pay the tax, sounds very much like a Minister who knows that he will not be around when that comes to pass. It shows what this Government is about when it wants to set up special courts to deal with citizens who do not pay the water tax in comparison to how quickly it moves to remove the loophole to facilitate banks in repossessing houses and how it took four years to bring any of the bankers before the courts. They still end up getting away with causing this crash. When we look around us we see very many of the same people moving into positions of power again on the boards of banks and developers being funded by NAMA to get back into business again in order to benefit from this recovery.

The Government amendment refers to meter charging being the fairest form of charging. The Government claps itself on the back for having capped the charge to ensure, as it says, that the charges are affordable. This is an acknowledgment that when it ultimately moves to metered charges, they will not be affordable for very many people. This is the point we who are opposed to this tax have been making all along, that there is a question of affordability and a question of fairness.

The Government likes to give the impression that Irish Water is a panacea for all those feckless county councils who did not invest in infrastructure and that this is what has left our water system the way it is. The fact is that the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government controlled the expenditure of county councils at every step along the way. The reason for the infrastructural problems is because the Department ensured that projects could not progress.

Before being elected to this House I worked in the water services in Donegal County Council in the Killybegs treatment plant. The plant was opened in 1994, designed to meet 1990 requirements for water production and where the investigations on the provision of a new plant started in 1973. At every step of the way the Department delayed and slowed down the process. The fact that there are problems with infrastructure is not the responsibility of local authorities but rather it is the responsibility of governments, this and previous governments.

The Government amendment makes much of the fact that there has been procurement savings as a result of the establishment of Irish Water. I know for a fact that in Donegal since the arrival of Irish Water, the cost of hiring in jet cleaners for sewer problems has doubled since the national procurement process came in. Where are the cost savings?

The Government makes much of the fact that the metering will highlight the leaks in the system. Irish Water has identified savings of 6% in accounted-for water from domestic metering. When the metering programme is finished and when all the leaks identified have been fixed, there will still be more than 40% of unaccounted-for water in the system. This is an extremely expensive non-solution to a problem, where they are looking in the wrong place for the leaks.

The introduction of Irish Water has been a fiasco and citizens are right to oppose the Government and the introduction of the tax. The only way they can oppose this unfair tax is by refusing to pay it.

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