Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte mór rompu go léir. The Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Future Funding of Domestic Water will meet later this afternoon to vote on its report on the future of water services. The report recommends the abolition of water charges, the scrapping of domestic metering, including for new builds, and provision for a referendum to retain our water infrastructure in public ownership.

This represents a massive and deserved victory for all those people from communities throughout Ireland who campaigned and resisted the imposition of charges, and who fought against the push to privatise our water services. The right to water movement has endured and has prevailed against great odds. The Minister knows that the majority of Deputies elected to this Dáil were elected on an anti-water charges platform.

If the sights and sounds of thousands of people marching time and again in protest was not enough for the Minister's party to grasp the level of public opposition to water charges, then surely the democratic vote at a general election should have been. Of course it was not. It fell on the closed ears of a Fine Gael-led Government. The Minister's Government turned its face against the express will of the people and it stopped the Dáil from dealing with the matter of water charges. His ministerial colleague and superhero friend, the Minister, Deputy Simon Coveney, pushed this politically charged issue of water charges into a new committee. He set it up. It was his process as well as the Minister, Deputy Varadkar's process. With its establishment, the Minister, Deputy Coveney, gave a very clear commitment to legislate and give full effect to the final recommendation of the committee. Now we hear that the Minister, Deputy Simon Coveney, is saying that he will not legislate on the basis of this report. He is blatantly stating that he will go back on a commitment that he gave. It was a very clear commitment. The result of the committee's deliberation did not go his way and now he is using a mangled interpretation of the European water framework directive to spin his way and the Government's way out of trouble.

The people have made their demands clear in protest after protest. They delivered a mandate to this Dáil to see that those demands were met. The Oireachtas, containing the democratically elected representatives of the people, has made its recommendations through the Joint Committee on the Future Funding of Domestic Water Services. These recommendations are fully in line with what the people of Ireland have been demanding for some years. The Minister needs to heed the advice of the committee that he himself established. I ask the Minister, Deputy Leo Varadkar, if he will tell the Minister, Deputy Simon Coveney, that he must stand by his word and legislate on the basis of the committee report.

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