Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

It is a great privilege to be here taking part in this democratic revolution, except that it does not feel like one. The whole fiasco reminds me of the phrase that "Those who can do, and those who can't bully." That is exactly what we have here. This is a desperate measure, a de facto admission that the Minister has failed to win the hearts and minds of citizens as to the worthiness of his Irish Water proposal. It has been exposed that the amount of money he plans to collect is roughly equal to the amount it will cost to collect it. Rather than stand back and admit he has got it wrong and rather than listen to the will of the people and abandon this lunacy, the Minister has decided to plough on. I honestly believe that will be the rock he will perish on.

I was going to say that one could not make this up, but it could be and has been made up. It is very much the scene from "Yes Minister" where the Minister is being shown around the new hospital by the civil servants and they pass the gleaming canteen, the hundreds of typists, the car park, the communications department and so on, and they go to the big empty rooms down the back and the Minister asks: "Oh, what is this?" and the response is: "They are the wards, but we haven't got the money to open them." That is what Irish Water is. It is hundreds of millions spent on meters, tens of millions spent on consultants and hundreds of thousands spent on advertising and hundreds of workers in a call centre. It is money for nothing, when what the Government should have been doing was fixing the leaks and encouraging people to conserve water.

The people have seen through the Minister and that is why we are here today. The Government has lost the argument. People know we have paid for water. We have paid for it through taxation and public services and we are not going to pay for a big monstrosity of a quango that soaks up money. I put it to the Minister that this Bill is a monument to his failure. In being here today, he is admitting he has failed to convince the people with the carrot of the reduced bills, because they all know they will increase again, and the €100 giveaway. Now he must resort to the stick. Being honest, it is a pathetic stick and I do not believe anybody will tremble before it, because despite the Minister's allusions to it today, this is not legislation to take money from tenant's deposits, which would be completely unworkable. The landlords of Ireland are not going to operate as the Minister's debt collectors. He is not able to take the money from people's wages and has clearly not won them to paying it voluntarily. He is on a loser on this. The people have seen through him. They are off their knees. They are not going to be conned. They were not conned by the carrot, and they certainly not going to be conned by the Minister's pathetic stick.

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