Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

I thank the Ceann Comhairle, the Bills Office and my office staff, who have helped to prepare this Bill. I thank my colleagues who have turned up to form a quorum. I really appreciate that. I do not see the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Alan Kelly, here this morning. That does not surprise me but it disappoints me. The Minister of State at the Department of Justice and Equality, Deputy Ó Ríordáin, has many responsibilities, and the latest to be added to his portfolio is the drugs issue. If they could get away with it, I would say that the Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, would put something into the water that would have us all go to sleep, lie down and take our dose of the medicine.

My Bill is effectively an effort to tame the beast of Irish Water. There are many hundreds of good people working in Irish Water, as there were in the county councils beforehand, doing a good public service and being obliging out of hours, on weekends, etc. They leave their families to fix breaks in supply and ensure water is in constant supply in the capital city and all the corners of Ireland. I also salute the people involved with the group schemes, who were real pioneers in their work bringing water to communities. The late, great Canon Hayes and others did that kind of work voluntarily, with enthusiasm and much pride. Moving from this, we can see that somebody had a pipe dream to set up a monopoly. "Pipe dream" is an appropriate phrase, but pipes explode every now and again as well. They did not check the pipes here first and the issue became very explosive. That pipe dream has fragmented and shattered.

My Bill was put together last September and October and I moved it here with the permission of the Ceann Comhairle in November. I am thankful it was drawn out of the lottery for this week. The Government decision of 19 November 2014 was that there would be one overarching, mainly non-executive, Ervia board with responsibility and accountability for the performance of the Ervia group. There would be two subsidiary companies of Irish Water and Gas Networks Ireland. The two subsidiaries would be subject to the control and oversight of the parent company but would have small executive boards to directly manage the business of each subsidiary. I want to make it crystal clear that the activities of all the boards, the subsidiaries, the main board and - crucially - any future subsidiaries should be open to the transparency of freedom of information legislation. There are only three or four main planks in the Bill and freedom of information is one of those. It is very important. We have seen in the past few weeks how extraordinarily difficult it is to obtain information about various banking boards and the same cannot be allowed to happen in this area. Nevertheless, it is happening right before our eyes. We were promised that the process would be transparent but it is not. This must be fully subject, unequivocally, to the full and active freedom of information process.

I wish to see the appointment of an ombudsman. The need for a completely separate and independent water services ombudsman was starkly highlighted this week by the release of information by the current Ombudsman with respect to public services. I did not have this information when I was putting together this Bill. The number of complaints to the Ombudsman about public services rose by 11% to 3,500 in 2014. When he launched his annual report last Wednesday, the Ombudsman, Mr. Peter Tyndall, stated that the increase was mainly due to the additional 200 public bodies that came within his jurisdiction for a full year for the first time in 2014, which is very telling. These included bodies in the education sector, such as the State Examinations Commission and Student Universal Support Ireland. How will the current Ombudsman deal with the inevitable flood of complaints regarding Uisce Éireann? I have always said that the only part of Irish Water that I welcomed was its ainm, Uisce Éireann. That is the only good part of it, as far as I can see. There is nothing else.

We need a separate ombudsman so we do not completely undermine and overload the current system. As we can see from Wednesday's report, it is already overloaded. Irish Water has made a mess of billing, contracting and the rest of it and we saw that unfold before our eyes all over the country. It is a wonder it is not billing people in England and America; that is how out of kilter are the ICT systems, and those people may yet receive those bills.

There is also the issue of summary of advice to the Minister from the Commission for Energy Regulation, CER. Before Irish Water was set up, the CER recommended that the economic regulatory framework for public water services in Ireland should be put in place, as it was for the electricity and gas sectors, based on four key principles. The ESB model should have been considered, admired and copied. The principles are stability, predictability, sustainability and cost-efficiency but questions genuinely need to be asked in terms of stability for whom, cost-efficiency for whom and predictability for what - my God, this will make some film in years to come. It will certainly not be for the many hundreds of thousands of households who will be trapped for repair costs. There should be an insurance policy built into the fee. It is fine if the cost is a bit extra but at least when there is a burst pipe in a house, there would be some fall-back for people on the bread line. These people are not all unemployed, as they also include people with small businesses and low-income individuals.

The CER also argued that in regulating the water sector, the commission would apply the same values as it has done in the electricity and gas sectors, namely, fair and transparent regulation, acting with integrity and respect and consulting with stakeholders. That is instead of setting up consultant companies; the vocabulary in the dictionary was changed by the former Minister, the big man from Kilkenny who is now a European Commissioner. I affectionately call him Big Phil Hogan, the enforcer. The values would also include being accountable to the Oireachtas, customers and stakeholders while making informed decisions but none of that has occurred.

This has been an absolute joke. Over the course of the past number of years, there have been at least eight increases in the price of energy household energy bills, all under the watch of the same Commission for Energy Regulation. It has done nothing to safeguard the interest of the household and it has been asleep at the wheel. We have seen how other regulators were found with their you-know-whats down in the past couple of weeks in different areas. They were asleep at the wheel but were offered big pensions. That is disgusting in the extreme and people are sickened by it. The Commission for Energy Regulation continues to state that in order to ensure the regulatory framework continues to be appropriate to the future needs and priorities of the sector, it proposes to adjust and refine the economic regulatory framework over time in line with the above principles. This is the type of bureaucratic language whose only purpose is to sound firm and fair. While leaving plenty of wiggle room for major change, it has nothing to do with what the hundreds of households deserve, desire and are entitled to as citizens of the State.

The need for an insurance policy provision is most clearly highlighted by the ongoing revelations this week about the extent of lead piping in the water infrastructure. I attended the weekly clinic with Deputy Cowen and others but it has become a joke. I was promised answers. I have been phoning and sending texts to people since 7.30 a.m. this morning but I still have no answers. One cannot get answers from anybody. Never mind a straight answer, we get no answer.

Families cannot be left with accumulated financial debt arising from exorbitant call out fees, and we saw the fees that were proposed. Is the alternative to leave families with leaking pipes and ever-increasing bills for water? They will be caught regardless of what way they turn. They cannot go anywhere, be it up or down the field or up or over the road. They will not even have water to wash themselves. We will not know what country we are living in as we will not be able to distinguish between whether it is a foreign country or our own country. On top of that families will then face having to find hundreds, if not thousands, of euro to have repairs carried out. That is a fact.

I do not know where the Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, the invincible, is today. I am very disappointed that a fellow Tipperary man would not have the courtesy to come to the House to debate this Bill. He says he does not own the situation, that he inherited it and it is all due to the Fine Gael Party and the former Minister, Mr. Phil Hogan. That will not get the Minister far in Rearcross or Carrick-on-Suir because people know the truth.

Where is the clarity about the massive fees that were discussed in the past? They are forgotten about now, but they were discussed previously and put into the public domain. How can a call out fee such as the proposed €120 an hour and charges such as €170 be justified for families on social welfare? I happen to know a little about pipes and I realise that if one were to carry out a survey of lead pipes in a house, the first and second hours would pass very quickly. These bills would amount to far more than the cost of paying the water bill. This is a real trick-of-the-loop job, or a case of "catch me if you can". However, when the election is held the Minister will be caught and he will have nowhere to run. He will not be saying, "catch me if you can".

I also seek clarity about the future sale, privatisation, public private partnership or whatever vehicle or wild animal the Government chooses to call it, before it flogs Irish Water as it did last week with Aer Lingus. As sure as it will get dark tonight and bright tomorrow morning that is what will happen. I seek a straight provision in the Bill that it will not be sold without a referendum. The Government is able to hold referendums on plenty of matters, so it can hold one on this question quite easily. It could have added it to the last referendum instead of the joke it had about the age for election as President. I seek to replace words such as "shall" or "may" with the phrases "will not be sold" or "cannot be sold" in the primary legislation, nothing more or less. It is unequivocal, straight language so people can say "Yes" or "No", not "shall" or "may" so barristers can argue the connotations ad infinitumin the Four Courts.

The Bill has four main objectives - a referendum about the future sale of Irish Water; freedom of information, which is vital; an insurance policy in respect of breaks and the exorbitant costs that could arise given that the stopcock could be out at the road and a mile away from one's house or at the front gate, in the driveway or at the back of the house; and the provision of an ombudsman. It is vital that an ombudsman is appointed because there will be thousands of complaints. We already have them on our desks. Every Deputy, Senator and councillor gets them, but there are no answers. Irish Water inherited the entire pipe network and water sources. One would have thought from listening to the Taoiseach and Tánaiste that there was never a pipe in the ground and that we were living in the Sahara desert, that there was not a drop of water anywhere until Irish Water was established. It is such an insult to the people who served this country, such as the pioneers of the group schemes and the engineering officials in all the county councils who designed the system. I thank them for that. It was a reasonable network. I accept there were problems in Dublin but if people had been looking after it there would be a better supply by now instead of trying to raid the Shannon. The years of Cromwell are gone. One must deal with people up-front and fairly and introduce cost saving and water saving initiatives. However, there is not one initiative in the entire system.

There is also the joke for which the Labour Party is solely responsible in its efforts to get out of the mess. The Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Burton, confirmed this week that €637,000 is being paid to a consultancy company to produce the information technology, IT, required to pay back the €100 to families. Has one ever heard anything to beat that? Playschool children would not do this. The consultancy company is BearingPoint Consulting, formerly a unit of KPMG. It is another cosy network. We would need a good fire hose, with more than water in the hose, to scatter that crowd and the rot of the big consultants and big business that are plundering this country before the eyes of the people. Successive Governments have allowed this to happen.

We are going to pay €637,000 for IT alone just to return the €100. Did one ever hear such B-U-L-L? It is unbelievable. Why could the Government not simply deduct the €100 from the bill? Children in preschool, indeed children who have not yet been born, would know that. For God's sake, this is laughable. The Government is paying consultants, advisers and everybody else to screw the people and take everything from them. Another nice sum of almost €1 million is gone on this. I have also heard that union officials are demanding more staff for the Department of Social Protection to deal with this payment. They should have nothing to do with it. There are many good staff in the Department and they have enough to do in dealing with the many issues in social welfare without being dragged into this mess in an effort to calm the fire. The Government could deal with it by deducting the €100, but there would be no consultants involved and no more gravy trains for the boys. One from two is one; it is quite simple. One does not need any IT skills or mathematics graduates to do that. It is tomfoolery of the highest order. It is skullduggery and I could use far stronger words but I do not wish to use them in the Chamber out of respect to the Ceann Comhairle and everybody else.

It is a failure, a disaster and a wild animal. I have called it a beast. We have an issue with BSE today, but this is worse than animals with BSE because, as I have said previously and I hope the Ceann Comhairle will not object, it is set up corruptly. It is not the people in the organisation but the basic-----

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