Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Cowen seems to have forgotten some of the more heated sessions at the water charges committee, to which I will return to refresh his memory and point to the difference between what he claims to have got at the end of the process and what is included in this legislation. The Bill before us is the latest in the long and sorry saga of Fianna Fáil's and Fine Gael's water charge regime. Deputy Cowen also forgot to tell us that it was Fianna Fáil who first put water charges on the table, in its agreement with the troika and its own programme for so-called recovery. At that point, they would have been in excess of €400 per household.

It is always worth remembering that we did not need to go down this route. We did not have to have metered domestic water charges. That is because the Government and its negotiators had secured an exemption in Article 9.4 of the water services directive. We could have funded water services directly from general taxation, not in the failed way in which it had historically been done by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael through the chronic underinvestment of local authorities but by way of a real and ambitious programme of general taxation. The problem was that the State simply did not want to invest the required level of revenue prior to the creation of Irish Water and metered domestic water charges. Irish Water's funding model was designed to allow the State to continue to underinvest. The very complex, off-balance sheet model underpinning Irish Water required the introduction of water charges. They were never about conservation and there is a growing body of academic research that shows that domestic water charges do not result in a long-term reduction in domestic water usage. They were never about asking people to pay for the service but underpinning a model that had been designed to allow the State not to invest in this vital strategic public service.

The arguments of those who are opposed to water charges are sometimes lost and we are accused of naked populism or having unconsidered views, but there are three fundamental reasons those of us on this side of the House opposed metered domestic water charges and the Irish Water funding model. The first is commodification. Something changes in a society when one starts to link access to water which is so essential for human life with payment in order that people do not have an entitlement to it on the basis of need but on their ability to pay. That is a fundamental shift which, in countries that have gone down that route, has a very clear consequence, namely, water poverty, something about which we never hear the Government talk in these debates, where families pay a disproportionate or an unacceptable proportion of their income on domestic water services. This member state of the European Union has the unique distinction of being the only one in which there is no water poverty. Some manage it better than others, but it is to be found in all of them.

The second reason we oppose water charges is financialisation. This is another of the great unspoken realities underpinning the original model. If the State refuses to invest the funds required, it requires a utility - in this case, Irish Water - to be reliant on private sector borrowing for funding which comes at a significantly greater cost. One of the most interesting things we discovered during the course of the Oireachtas committee's hearings was the NewERA report which had previously been denied to us under freedom of information legislation but which showed very clearly the additional cost to the State and the taxpayer of going down the private financing route.

The final element is privatisation. The Government will state it never had any intention of privatising water services, but, to some extent, that does not matter. The policy process followed in this country was also followed in many other parts of the world and it involved a set of steps. Even if the original intention was not to privatise a utility, given the level of interest in the private sector and its desire to invest in such services for profit and given the unwillingness of governments to invest, once commodification and reliance on private finance was introduced, privatisation, almost always and universally, followed.

I was once asked why I was against charges for water but not against charges for electricity and gas. The simple answer is that water provision is fundamentally different. It is a finite resource. There is only a limited amount available, as we know from many studies. Unlike electricity and gas, it is the new oil, the oil of the 21st century. The scale of private financial investment across the world shows that when one goes down this route, those who need water the most often have the poorest access to it. I have no doubt that if Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had got their way, we would at this point be in a discussion on the possible privatisation of services. We know from looking across the water to England what that means - it means lower levels of investment in infrastructure, higher levels of charges and poor quality service.

Contrary to Deputy Cowen's reading of how we ended up forcing the Government to backtrack on this issue, what mattered was a campaign by hundreds of thousands of people who marched, demonstrated, boycotted and used their influence in the general election. One of the first stunning successes of the Right2Water movement of citizens, communities, trade unions and political parties was forcing Fianna Fáil into making two very significant U-turns in its manifesto for the last general election in which, for the first time, it clearly and unequivocally called for the scrapping of water charges and the abolition of Irish Water, a decision I welcomed as a good one. That would not have happened without that mass mobilisation of people across the State.

The Right2Water movement called for a number of things, which are directly relevant to the legislation in front of us and the work of the special Oireachtas committee. The first was for the enshrining in public ownership of the water system in the Constitution, the second was the funding of water services from general taxation and, crucially, increased investment to meet the level of need in the service, while the third was the abolition of water charges and metering and the replacement of Irish Water with a genuinely public and democratically accountable water and sanitation board. Of all the many campaigns in which I have been involved, it has been one of the most successful, but have we yet got to the end of the battle? No, we have not. Have we achieved everything we set out to do? No, we have not. The campaign group is still in place and mobilised and watching proceedings in this House with acute interest.

Contrary to Deputy Cowen's portrayal of the confidence and supply agreement as mature politics, it was really about kicking the can down the road by the two parties on either side of the House who needed each other's support. As they could not reach an agreement, they threw the issue to an expert group and then to a special Oireachtas committee, to be dealt with at a later stage. The first problem for Fine Gael was presented by the recommendations made by the expert group which took the party by surprise. The crucial one involved the recognition of the fact that domestic water services should be funded, in the main, from general taxation. That was a huge shift which discomfited the members of the party. The expert group also fully supported Right2Water's proposition that there should be constitutional protection for water services, as well as making some very good recommendations on other issues.

We then had the special Oireachtas committee. I am not sure whether one could call it calm and reasoned as a lot of the time it became very acrimonious, but we managed to get through the work with some delays. The recommendations made in our report are also important, particularly as most of them are not included in the legislation in front of us. They include constitutional protection for the public water system. As Deputy Cowen rightly said, equity of treatment for those in group water schemes was important for us, as were greater levels of public engagement and transparency, in relation to which there are some moves made in the legislation. Crucially, it called for a far more ambitious programme targeted at water conservation, planning regulations, education and the use of new technologies.

While a number of us did not support the final report, and I will come to that in a second, clearly there was a range of issues on which there was absolute unanimity. The irony of the legislation in front of us is that it is those issues on which there was absolute unanimity that we have yet to see any action from the Government.

That leads me to the Bill before us. This is a complex piece of legislation. However, the Minister speed-reading through a set of bullet points which tell us what is in the explanatory memorandum but do not go into much detail about how the actual text of the Bill will achieve those objectives is deeply disappointing. What have we got? Yet again, another complex piece of water services legislation is being rushed through the House. Our deadline for amendment is Friday. We will rush through Committee Stage next week having only got the Bill from publication last Friday. I am not casting any aspersions on the hard-working officials who produced the legislation but when the House is forced to proceed with these types of Bills in this way, mistakes are made and we have seen that previously, particularly in regard to water services legislation.

I am really surprised with the miscellaneous amendments on property and motor tax. They might be very simple and straightforward but they will be lost in this debate and again, we will not have sufficient time at committee to ensure they are what the Minister says they are.

In terms of what is not in the Bill, there is nothing on the referendum. This House has passed legislation for a referendum. The committee has commenced pre-legislative scrutiny but we cannot progress that Bill because the former Minister and now the current Minister are telling us that they are still awaiting advice from the Attorney General. On the one hand the Minister expects us to pass the legislation he wants to get through the House, such as the Construction Industry Register Ireland, CIRI, legislation and other things coming down the line, but we are none the wiser in terms of when the referendum legislation transpires. I get the feeling that there is a deliberate attempt by the Department to drag its heels on that Bill to prevent the Oireachtas committee from doing its important work. That is disrespectful. I understand that the Attorney General is busy and the Government has a lot of work but it has been almost a year since that Bill was passed in this House by a majority vote, and we still cannot get it through the formal Committee Stage. If the Government does not want to support it, that is fine. If the Government wants to propose amendments, that is fine, but it should come back to committee and let us proceed on all of that.

I strongly echo and support Deputy Cowen's remarks about those in group water schemes. There has been plenty of time over the past year to tackle this issue. I believe what people want to hear is that the Government is absolutely committed to equality of treatment between those in group and private water schemes and those in the public system. If there is no standing charge for people accessing domestic water services for their home in urban Ireland there should be no standing charge for those in rural Ireland, and where additional costs are incurred regarding the installation and maintenance of private or group water schemes, that that would be covered. It is actually very small amounts of money in the bigger scheme of things from the data we got at the committee, but I have yet to hear the Government say it is absolutely committed to that recommendation in a report.

One of the most interesting parts of the committee's deliberations was the very detailed discussions we had on conservation. There were very good contributions from all Members of the House from Fianna Fáil, the Labour Party, the Green Party, ourselves and others yet where are the proposed amendments to planning legislation, building regulations, investment in retrofitting programmes and ensuring that, for example, with social housing new builds all local authorities have to have the highest standards, for example, of water efficiency and water conservation? Local authorities are doing good stuff but there needs to be standardisation of that.

For me, however, there are a couple of really big question marks over the Bill. The single biggest row in the water committee, and Deputy O'Sullivan will remember this, was a row between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Fine Gael wanted an excess charge based on average household consumption. Fianna Fáil wanted an excess charge or a fine, as it calls it, based on individual average consumption. In fact, in the final report, a very well paid senior counsel inserted a sentence which gave us both options and did not recommend one or the other.

From my reading of the Bill, Fine Gael has won-----

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