Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To put this into context, approximately 840,000 water meters have been installed and many people do not have a problem with that. The Deputy talks about this issue as if every person in the country is trying to block water meters being installed in respect of their own water systems, but that is not the case. Some people have real objections to this but many people do not. Many people have been using water meters to manage how they use water and to conserve it. We know that because 40% of people, which is way beyond what most people were expecting, were paying water charges at below the cap. We cannot operate as a Government on the basis of people threatening protests and therefore we must not do anything.

With regard to the metering programme, we are concluding phase 1 of the metering roll-out, which will be finished in the next few months-----

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