Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputies and parties for their support of this Bill. It is an important Bill which has been reflected by the Minister offering pre-legislative access to it. I will not put down red lines yet. However, we need to progress this quickly and not see it buried in the legislative process. Under the new politics arrangement, ten weeks are given for Committee Stage. I would like that timeframe to be kept to as close as possible with this Bill.

Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan made the point that Governments and legislation can come and go. A Government could be elected at the next election with a huge majority, like the previous one, and change existing water ownership legislation without any recourse to the people or Opposition Deputies. Multinationals and wealthy people do not come and go. Instead, they plan for ten, 20 and 30 years down the line about where they want to make their money, where they are going to invest and what governments will allow them open their markets to access public services. That is their plan and we know that. None of us are idiots in that respect. There is a real and crucial need to put public ownership and management of our water supply into our Constitution. If Ireland had water meters and charges in place when the troika came in, it would have forced us to privatise our water supply, like it has done in Greece and Portugal. Putting this into our Constitution protects us from this and states we will not accept such a move.

Then the debate can come out of this because people do not trust this Government or the EU, as reflected in the Brexit vote. It is down to the whole idea of being told what to do. People are fearful of this. We need to protect essential public services. This is the first step to that. I would welcome if all Members got stuck into this and developed the best legislation out of it. Article 28 should be amended to make this and successive Governments responsible for the maintenance of the water supply and vindicate the right of the people to have access to treated water.

No one has a problem with there being one entity. That is not the issue; people just do not believe Irish Water will stay in public ownership and they believe it will be privatised. It is set up to be privatised.

I thank the Deputies for their support. The management part is key. If any entity is to be set up, the Government must be responsible for overseeing it. It is really important that it not end up like Aer Lingus, for example. The Government had a certain share in the airline but this was sold off in the interest of somebody else. All of a sudden we had no public airline in Dublin.

Let me make one point on the pipeline from Shannon. This issue has been arising for a while. I do not know how much it will cost. It could cost millions or billions to bring a pipeline from Shannon to Dublin to serve the greater Dublin region. I have continuously raised in the Dáil a point that seems to have fallen on deaf ears. If the money were spent on fixing the 35% of pipes in the ground that are carrying treated water, it would go along way towards sending water to taps rather than into the ground. If we retrofitted all our homes and businesses to ensure treated water would not be going down our toilet bowls and that rainwater and water from other types of systems would be used, we would save millions of litres of treated water. These are the issues we must debate. Rather than taking a resource from the people along the Shannon, the prospect of which inspires fear among them, we should fix the leaks where they happen and retrofit all our homes. We should use the money to do this rather than to address other aspects.

I look forward to Committee and Remaining Stages and to the Bill passing through the Seanad and coming back to the Dáil. We will have what I propose because people are demanding it.

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