Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Déanfaidh mé mo dhícheall. The Acting Chairman might give me a bit of extra time. We need the right to protest and the right to free speech. We need to hear all sides.

In this debate, we could not hear from all sides. We never heard anything from the private well owners who have to pick up the tab. We are told now that the Bill makes provision for an ombudsman through a commission for regulation of utilities in respect of dispute resolution for customers. I am glad the Government has come around to this idea, given how remarkably similar it is to what I suggested in my Private Members' Bill on this issue, the Water Services (Amendment) Bill 2014. Back then they would not hear of it and it could not be countenanced. On Second Stage of that Bill, I explicitly made the point that I wished to see the appointment of a dedicated water ombudsman.

We heard from Deputy Barry Cowen last night and he assures me that a working group is now going to be set up to ensure fairness for rural dwellers. I welcome that effort but I hate the mention of working groups. I know it is in the Bill. Working groups are another quango. They are there to do what? The Government should just give some semblance of fair play to the people and some respect for those who own wells and what they pay and how they pay.

Three years ago, the need for a completely separate and independent water services oversight officer was starkly highlighted by the then ombudsman with respect to public services. The number of complaints to the ombudsman about public services rose by 11% to 3,500 in 2014. When he launched his annual report in 2015, the ombudsman stated that the increase was due to the additional 200 public bodies that came within his jurisdiction for a full year for the first time in 2014, which is very telling. Through public bodies, public service is supposed to be given to the people. Where is the service? These included bodies in the education sector such as the State Examinations Commission and Student Universal Support Ireland. My concern at the time, which this Bill seems to address, was how the ombudsman's office could deal with the inevitable flood of complaints regarding Uisce Éireann. I have always said that the only good part of the whole situation was the ainm - Uisce Éireann. There is nothing else. We need a separate ombudsman or customer dispute process so we do not completely undermine and overload the current system. That should be glaringly obvious when 200 bodies went under the ombudsman's remit in 2014.

There is also the issue of the Commission for Energy Regulation, CER. It has failed miserably to control energy costs with increases in gas, electricity and everything else. It is just another quango. It is people on boards again, getting paid and doing nothing. The do-nothing brigade we can call them. Before Irish Water was set up, the CER recommended that an economic regulatory framework for public water services in Ireland should be put in place, as it was for the electricity and gas sectors, based on four principles. The ESB model should have been considered, admired and copied because it is a good model. The four principles were stability, predictability, sustainability and cost efficiency.

I know how stable the confidence and supply arrangement is with the Government in the current situation. We saw how the water committee dragged out its deliberations for so long. In the end, it came up with a mended pipe done by a bad joiner with faulty fittings. It is just waiting to rupture again the next time the pressure comes on. There will be another burst further down the line. That is what we are operating on. We have seen absolutely nothing of these things with respect to Irish Water and Government policy generally as it has lurched faster and faster from one crisis to another. That is my honest belief. I cannot support it now and did not support it then.

There is no mention in this Bill at all of the workers in the county councils who now are very concerned. Some of them have been transferred and more are about to be transferred. They are in limbo. When there is a break like the one we saw up in the north east, in Deputy Fergus O'Dowd's constituency, they had not even the parts and could not get them. The knowledge the water caretakers had of every pipe and every main going through fields and under buildings and wherever else, is all lost. There is a lack of goodwill as well because they have been mistreated.

The public now will come up to a water caretaker or water worker and say there is a leak in such-and-such a place, which is good civic duty. They will be told they cannot do anything about it. They are told they must ring Irish Water and log in and complain and get a complaint number. Such farcical baloney - I have never seen the like of it in my life. It adds two or three days of a delay. I have elderly women and younger people with water leaks undermining their houses, in some cases for months and months. I am not talking about a small leak but huge flows of water. They cannot be fixed because Irish Water cannot get around to it. Irish Water can tell a person what county he is in, what parish, what the residence number is and everything else. It is pure crazy, nothing short of it.

It has just added another layer of bureaucracy between the people who do the work and the men above who give the orders. There are many of them there, paper pushers as I said, and there are all the county managers. Some of them have now left the scene again, including the former Dublin county manager and the one from my county. I do not know what they contributed and look at all the pensions they went off with. It is disgusting. That is why people are so angry about the water. As I said, they have a right to be angry. Many of those people went out, had public meetings, got together and met politicians long before my time, 50 or 60 years ago. They did group schemes themselves and laid the pipes with their bare hands. In recent years there was some funding for grants which was then diminished and attacked alongside the establishment of Irish Water.

I want to put some figures on the record. Funding for the 2017 grant allocations to local authorities for group water and group sewerage schemes is a drop in the ocean in comparison to the cuts imposed on the schemes over the last number of years. The Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, confirmed that an additional €3.676 million will be paid under the 2017 rural water programme on top of the €11.6 million announced in June. While an increase of €3.6 million for the coming year is of course better than a cut, we need to remember that it was a Fine Gael-led Government that slashed almost €50 million from the group water scheme from 2011 to 2016. The information provided to me in a reply to a parliamentary question shows that in 2011 the Department funded all local authorities to administer the rural water programme to the tune of €70 million. By 2016 that amount had dropped to €20 million. All the while they were spending massive millions - €590 million - on a metering programme and providing all the money for offices, consultants and all the now retired county managers and public officials brought in on boards and advisory groups. It is a pure stinking quango.

That €50 million was taken away from the people and now we are saying we are going to set up a working group to look after them and make sure they are cherished equally. It is an insult and a downright attack on the rights of rural people. I am not saying everyone affected is living in the country: they are in villages too and in towns, and there are people in the cities who have a septic tank. We had the septic tanks then, and Phil the Enforcer. What does the Government plan to do there? It is a cop-out and a con job of the highest order. It was fiver Friday; Phil Hogan dropped it down from €50 to a fiver one day under pressure. He ran with his tail between his legs and we see him fleetingly at Carlow matches and other events but he is not welcome even back in his home county of Kilkenny. The Minister of State, Deputy John Paul Phelan, knows that as well as I do.

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