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

The heralding of the Bill as a planned progressive step to stop people being imprisoned for non-payment of debt is a sleight of hand. As other Deputies have pointed out, the reason we are here today, on a non-sitting day, is that the Government has lost the battle to convince Irish citizens they should pay water charges and buy in to the Irish Water project. What we have seen in the past year is a succession of various stages when the Government tried to change tack to deal with this popular rebellion. At every stage the Government has been caught out. No one believed the propaganda that this was a charge to bring in water conservation. Nobody trusted the Government with PPS numbers. Nobody believed the registration figures being bandied about when every postal worker in the country knew about the return to sender registration forms being stockpiled in post offices. Having not fallen for the carrot the Government put forward the people are now being treated to a little bit of a stick, or an attempt at a stick.

The idea of legislation to deal with not imprisoning people for non-payment of debt has been already discussed in the House. That there, of course, should be alternatives to prison is broadly supported by everybody across the board. The idea that attachment orders to earnings is the solution to this is short-sighted and a nonsense, particularly when one of the main reasons for non-payment of fines and debts is poverty and a lack of income in the first place. The idea we would enact legislation to enable people's details to be seen by their employers and have their pay packets or social welfare ransacked is reprehensible. I do not have Deputy Wallace's direct experience of community service but I certainly support the points he made on it being a much better and cheaper alternative for society which has a better impact on citizens.

None of us objects to the fact people would not be imprisoned for debt. To be honest, we need an overall discussion on people being imprisoned at all.

On a whole range of measures, it is a costly and unworkable system that causes greater problems for society instead of alleviating them. However, let us be honest, that is not what these proposals are about. The Bill, in its current form, will introduce a system that is hugely complex and unworkable in many ways. The idea that an employee's personal details would be made available to his or employer sets a very dangerous precedent. Whatever about that happening in the case of an isolated incident such as a person's failure to pay a court fine, television licence fee or something like that, the notion that the employers of Ireland should turn themselves into debt collectors on behalf of Irish Water is completely unworkable in the context of what we know will be a mass non-payment of water charges. It is not about Deputies in this House or mythical leaders inciting people to break the law. Many of our citizens cannot pay the charge and many others are taking the stance of not paying because they do not believe in handing over their hard-earned money to an institution that was set up to raise money to cover its own costs and will not in any way deal with the problems relating to our water infrastructure.

How will the proposals to have employers operate as debt collectors work in a large company with large-scale non-payment by employees of water charges? It could well be that many of those workers are on low wages and with part-time hours. Who will oversee the implementation of attachment orders? Will employers have to take on additional staff in human resources departments? The Minister tells us the courts will, under the legislation, set an amount to be deducted periodically from a debtor's wages. That might have been okay in the old days when people had steady, permanent and pensionable employment with a regular wage coming in. In the modern economy, however, many workers are in situations far removed from that, with flexible hours, unpredictable working arrangements and so on. In fact, Ireland has the second worst record in the EU when it comes to underpayment of employees. If a debtor's wages fluctuate, will it be necessary to go back to the courts every second week to deal with the attachment order? Not only workers but many employers, I suspect, will object to such an arrangement. There is a particular objection to the fact that punitive measures are being brought in to deal with the small debts of citizens while the debts of the banks are being pushed onto the shoulders of the same citizens and are the reason they are struggling to pay their bills in the first place.

It is very clear why the Government is pushing through this legislation. It wants to create the impression that water charges will, like the property tax, be immediately deducted from people's wages. In fact, this measure is merely a stunt designed to demoralise and intimidate citizens who have made clear their strenuous objection to those charges. The Government is trying to create the impression it will have greater power than it actually does to compel people to pay up. What is being proposed is that if householders do not pay their water charges - I, like many others, certainly will not be paying them - they run the risk of being brought to court. In instances where people are brought to court and a judgment is obtained against them, and if their debt is more than €500, they could be brought to court again and an attachment order sought to have the moneys deducted from their wages, depending on their incomes, outgoings and so on. As other speakers have pointed out, this will affect no one for two years and will not, therefore, be a problem for this Government. Those currently in office will not be here to deal with it. One might wonder whether Irish Water itself will still be around in two years time. That certainly is a question that is up for debate.

Above all, the idea that the courts will be able to deal with the citizens who refuse to pay water charges is simply laughable. If householders decide to contest orders made against them, as I expect they will, the courts will be clogged up for years. I had direct experience of this situation in the 1990s when water charges were introduced in the three Dublin local authority areas. The councils could not combat the resistance of the population to paying the charges, with the result that the law was changed to prevent water supplies from being disconnected. The only power the councils had to collect that debt was to bring people to court. That was the only remedy available to them.

Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív is right that ordinary people do not like being brought to court because it is an intimidating experience and generally something to which they are unaccustomed. However, when the attempt was made to reintroduce water charges in the 1990s, when court summonses were being issued to households on practically every street in Dublin, those people went into court with their heads held high as representatives of their community who were making a stand on behalf of others. Days in court became days of defiance where people celebrated their resistance and stood behind their neighbours. Hundreds of people were brought before the courts and the process went on for two to three years. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of non-payers continued not to pay. That was what happened when this was an issue only in the three Dublin local authority areas. How different will a nationwide campaign be, with hundreds of thousands of people refusing to pay? It would take thousands of years for the courts to process all those cases if they are challenged, as I expect they will be. The system is simply unworkable.

The Government must acknowledge that citizens have a legitimate concern in their objection to Irish Water. This is not protest for the sake of it but very much a reaction to what people see as the last straw. There is a widely held view in this country that access to water is a human right and should be on the basis of need and not material well-being. Objection to water charges is based on the fact that people are being asked to pay for it by way of one of the most regressive forms of taxation in Europe. If we want to fund public services properly, a more progressive form of taxation should be introduced. This Bill is ill-timed and will prove unworkable in the context of water charges. Indeed, it will probably see an inflaming of the resistance to those charges.

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