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

In many ways, this Bill is an admission of defeat and fear on the part of the Government and a tribute to the unprecedented popular rebellion and mobilisation that has taken place against water charges over the past year. We have come a long way from when the water charges were first mooted to be introduced by this Government, when there were many threats and much bullying talk, which was summed up when the former Minister, Commissioner Hogan, threatened to reduce water to a trickle for anybody who could not or would not pay the water charges. The Government's strident and confident approach to trying to introduce these regressive and unfair charges has disappeared in the face of a mass popular movement that has brought unprecedented numbers of people out on the streets and forced the Government into a series of humiliating U-turns on charges.

The threat to turn off people's water or reduce it to a trickle was disgraceful for anybody to even consider when we are talking about a basic human right and something that people need to exist. That threat was taken off the table and the amount of the charge was reduced, with a cap introduced for the charges in order to essentially appease the popular rebellion taking place on the streets as the Government backtracked. This Bill, along with the Environment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2014 that we dealt with a week ago - in essence, a new Bill shoehorned into an older Bill at the last minute - are a further admission that this Government is just terrified of the massive movement against water charges. It is so terrified that it has had to hide anything to do with those water charges inside an apparently innocuous Environment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2014. It meant that Bill, along with the legislation now being discussed, could be put into the last couple of weeks of the Dáil term so as to avoid creating any focus for the anti-water charges movement to mobilise on yet again.

I am absolutely sure the Government was aware that there was a plan to have demonstrations when this legislation appeared and it did its best to try to minimise the time we would have to mobilise significant numbers. Hence, the effort to smuggle some matters to do with water charges into the Environment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2014 at the last minute and ram this Bill through in the last couple of weeks.

The public needs to recognise its own power and the fact that the Government is quaking in its boots in the face of the sort of mobilisations we have seen over the last year or so. The fact that Irish Water will not give out the figures on how many people have paid or not paid speaks for itself. It indicates that there is an unprecedented mass action of peaceful civil disobedience going on across the country. Regardless of the attempts by this Government to manipulate the Dáil timetable, to play fast and loose with the whole legislative process, and to spin and propagandise about the power it has or intends to give itself to deal with that boycott, the reality is that, just as the people of Greece had the courage to say "No" when faced with the bullying and threats of the troika and Angela Merkel, hundreds of thousands have the courage to say "No" to this Government's attempt to impose a totally regressive and unfair austerity tax, and they are clearly doing so in droves by refusing to pay these water bills.

Against that background, what we have in this legislation is an attempt to make people think the Government has powers that it does not have to undermine that boycott. That is what this legislation is all about. Again, it is smuggled in in an apparently progressive move. One aspect of this is progressive, namely, the removal of the threat of imprisonment for people who are unable to pay small debts. That is a progressive measure, although the add-on of attachment orders, under which employers would be asked to make deductions from people's earnings, is an absolute disgrace. Employers would effectively be given a political profile of their employees. If they are, as hundreds of thousands are, engaged in an act of political protest by refusing to pay water charges, their employers will be given that information by the courts, with all the potential ramifications that could have for individuals. It also applies in the case of bills that people might simply have been unable to pay because they are poor, because they are low-paid, because they are on zero-hour or low-hour contracts, or for whatever reason. The Government is proposing to give people's employers the information that they have been unable to pay debts and have had court orders made against them to the effect that their employers are to deduct those unpaid debts. That is a pretty disgraceful move.

This is another in a very long litany of utterly treacherous things for the Labour Party to do. For the Labour Party to give an employer that kind of information, detail and power over an employee is nauseating. However, we should not be surprised by a further betrayal by the Labour Party, which has given up even any slight pretence of being a progressive, left-wing party with the things it has done and the betrayals it has perpetrated over the last few years.

That is a disgraceful element of this legislation, but the key characteristic of the legislation is that the Government is trying to kick the whole thing down the road. It is trying to shoehorn this Bill into a short period of time, misrepresent what is actually in it, and then kick the substantial issue of how to deal with a mass boycott down the line until after a general election. This is an act of political cowardice of the highest order. What I want to say to the many people who are opposed to water charges and who have been on the protests is that it proves how powerful this movement is. People need to understand that this sort of power, which can make the Government run, hide, kick cans down the road, manipulate, spin and mess around with the legislative process, shows that people are winning and that if they maintain the boycott and the massive mobilisations on the streets over the coming months, these water charges can be defeated and the Government that introduced them can be swept out of office.

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