Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The Social Democrats are proud signatories of this motion to abolish domestic water charges, end the commercial semi-State model and replace it with a public utility model and hold a referendum seeking to guarantee permanent public ownership of the water system.

The idea of moving from 34 separate bodies to a national water entity is a good one and progress is being made on the engineering front. However, the idea of creating this entity as a commercial semi-State is not a good one because there is always a future risk of privatisation. The Minister, Deputy Coveney, has stated many times that he has no intention of privatising Ireland's water supply. I take him at his word but we have no idea what any future Government might do in five, ten or 20 years. I am not a conspiracy theorist but a look at Jean-Claude Trichet's letter to the late Brian Lenihan in 2010 is very interesting. It is the letter in which Trichet suggests that Ireland needs a bailout and in it he proposes two structural reforms for Ireland. One of them is that we should start charging people for water. No central banker has any business telling any sovereign government the structural reforms in which it should engage. It certainly has no business telling any sovereign government that it needs to start charging for water. One must, therefore, ask why something as specific and localised as that would end up in a letter from Jean-Claude Trichet to the late Brian Lenihan, which referred to an existential crisis for Europe's banks.

The other bad idea is the domestic water charge. The rationale consistently given by this Government is that it is needed to pay for the upgrade. Of course, that is not true. I have provided an analysis, which I have shared with Irish Water and which has been verified by several economists. The analysis shows that the cost of collecting the domestic water charge more or less equals the amount of money that is collected. As a result, none of the money that people are paying out is being used to upgrade the system, nor is it being used to provide them with water. It is being used to cover the cost of taking the money off them. That is all it is doing. Therefore, the rationale that the domestic water charge is somehow necessary to fund an upgrade of the system simply does not stack up. The only way it would stack up is if we doubled the charge - then there would be additional money.

New figures from Irish Water this week show that the total difference in funding required by Irish Water up to 2019 or 2020 - compared to the base case of 2010 that we are all using - to do everything will be approximately €150 million. Is it more efficient, sensible and cognisant of the democratic mandate and the will of the people to raise that €150 million centrally through Exchequer funding - borrow it, if needs be, just as Irish Water is doing - or to proceed with an extraordinarily expensive domestic water charge? I calculate that the cost of collecting the money for the first ten years will be about €1 billion. The political mandate on this is clear. The Irish people want a permanent, public water entity protected by a referendum to change the Constitution. We should do that. The economic case is absolutely clear: the best way to provide the funding required - which, thanks to a lot of the cost reduction going on in Irish Water, is relatively small at approximately €150 million - is through central Exchequer funding.

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