Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I can tell the Minister of State that I am tired of standing here and I would much rather be somewhere else. I honestly feel, however, that the more we keep this discussion going the more the people out there will have an opportunity to look at the details of what the Government is doing. What has been done in circumventing Second and Committee Stages was a deliberate attempt to hoodwink the people. I have just tried to explain that to those gathered outside Leinster House this evening. It is the anger over those tactics and that kind of skullduggery that have so many angry people on the streets. They are furious because they are being treated with contempt. The only protest we can put up against this is to drag out the debate so that people get a chance to examine the details of what the Government is doing. In that way, they may be able to apply some political pressure, not that I think it will make much difference to the Government at this stage.

I take solace from the fact that the reason the Government sought to bypass Second and Committee Stages was because Ministers knew there were going to be protests. They tried to condense down to an absolute minimum the period in which this Dáil will be debating water-related issues. The Government knows that its support in the opinion polls plummeted when the protests were at their height at the end of last year. There was a direct correlation because support for the Government parties collapsed when the protests were at their height. The Government could never admit this because that would be giving away the big secret that the people have the power to defeat it. The Government will not admit or acknowledge it but it is well aware of it when plotting the sort of skulduggery it has engaged in on this legislation.

The Government asked itself how it could prevent this matter from becoming a major public focus. It decided to smuggle it in an apparently innocent and innocuous Bill, thus minimising the possibilities for the Opposition to make any noise about it or create any potential focus or protest outside. That is what the Government is doing.

The issue is about undermining, subverting and defeating opposition to the austerity agenda. It is less dramatic and severe than what the troika is doing to the Greeks but the tactics are from the same hymn book. The Government is fearful, just as the troika is fearful of the example that the Syriza Government, and the sentiment that elected them, represent to the neo-liberal agenda in Europe. They are scared and that is why they are deploying such foul tactics against the Greek people.

It certainly has nothing to do with the payment of debts, as I pointed out to people outside Leinster House this evening. It has nothing to do with the necessity to pay off debts or deal with deficits. The Government has no problem in writing down debts for people. Hundreds of millions were written down in IBRC to the benefit of some of the richest people in the country. The Government can do that without any problem. It can write down those debts but it is different when it comes to ordinary people who cannot bear the burden of having to pay off these odious debts any longer, because infant mortality, poverty and deprivation have gone through the roof, while incomes and pensions have been slashed. In addition, people are committing suicide at a dramatically increased rate. When ordinary people say they cannot pay, however, the Government says "No, sorry lads, you'll have to pay off the debts. We know it hurts and we know it's painful, but that's just the way it is. Debts have to be paid off".

The Taoiseach's famous phrase was that he did not want to have the words "I didn't pay my debts" written on his forehead. There is no problem for some of the richest people in the country, however. If they want a debt write-down, they can have it at any time because we have to incentivise the entrepreneurs. Then the same entrepreneurs get the contracts for Irish Water. Honestly, one could not make it up. The Italian Mafia would be very proud of it. They could not dream up a scam like the one the Government has engineered around Irish Water. The company that is putting in the meters has benefited from this massive write-down for one of the richest people in the country, who also became one of the richest people in the country because he got the second mobile telephone licence under murky circumstances, to put it mildly.

That is not my opinion but that of the Moriarty tribunal yet still nothing is done about it. It sickens people that nothing was done about that and the very same people reappear to make an absolute fortune. How much profit will Sierra and Siteserv make out of the contract to install these meters? A lot of money. The increase in Mr. O'Brien's wealth since 2006 is unbelievable. The rest of the country has become much poorer and has seen incomes cut by 20% or 30%, deprivation has risen, poverty has risen and yet his wealth has gone from approximately €2.6 billion to over €6 billion in the same number of years. We could pay for the entire investment programme for the next four years by just using a wealth tax to cancel out the extra billions he, just one individual, has got over the past six years. If we just took it back he would still be left with the €2 billion he had back in 2006. If we did the same with the extra wealth a few other multimillionaires and multibillionaires have accumulated in the past five years, while the rest of us have been impoverished, it would pay for the necessary rehabilitation programme for water. That is the scandal the Government has presided over while it continues with a load of bogus arguments about being interested in fixing the water infrastructure.

Some terms and conditions for customers of Irish Water are extraordinary. A person on one of the protests pointed me to the agreement to which one signs up when one registers with Irish Water, one provision of which is that anyone who harvests rainwater from their roof, their paving, their windows or anywhere on their property has to get written permission from Irish Water to do so. That gives the lie to the claim that water charges are about encouraging conservation, which the Minister claims to support. Why would that be? I bet the Minister of State has not even read the agreement but why would Irish Water have a stipulation that the householder would require written permission to harvest water? There is a very obvious reason but the Government has not mentioned it and most people who have registered are blissfully unaware of it. If people start to conserve more water to reduce their water charges bill by, for example, not flushing their toilets so much, Irish Water will increase the water out charge when the metering comes up. That is a standard feature of what has happened elsewhere, such as in Detroit and everywhere else in the world where there is a similar model in which there is a charge for water in and water out. At the moment the ratio is 50:50 but the water companies tend to vary this over time. In Detroit one now pays much more for water out than water in because people conserve more as the charges rise, but the water has to go out into the system so the companies increase their charges for water out to deny people the benefit of conserving it. This removes the incentive to conserve water at all.

In Bolivia, when Bechtel, the nasty, profiteering gang which set up the infrastructure for the US army in Iraq, was in control of the water system, it sent inspectors to the poorest shanty towns to tell people who had water collection receptacles on their roofs to pay for them. The people eventually chucked them out after two years of sustained protests but that provision is in the customer agreement which a person signs up to when he or she registers with Irish Water. So much for conservation. It is all about money and profit. It is about setting up a utility, which will be privatised, to make money out of what is a basic human need.

We beg to differ with the Government on how to vindicate the basic human right for water and believe it should be paid for through fair and progressive taxation. We think it would be fairer and more efficient and would yield more revenue to tax the people who do not pay their fair share at the moment, whether they are the corporate profiteers, the super-rich with their accumulated wealth, the very high earners or the financial speculators, instead of this regressive unfair austerity charge.

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