Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I strongly support this amendment. One of the shocking examples of the waste of money in this whole debacle of Irish Water was the installation of household meters. Anybody looking objectively and impartially at value for money for the public would have said this was madness. The amount of money that was spent on putting in these household meters was to capture what Irish Water itself said was only 7% of the leaks in the system, that is, only 7% of the water leaking out of the system leaked from households to the mains whereas 93% of it was leaking beyond that, and the meters which have cost us close to €1 billion will not capture that. If that €1 billion had instead gone into ramping up the capital investment programme to deal with upgrading the mains infrastructure and dealing with the leaks, we would be in a much better place now.

On a point that is not highlighted enough, it was those who claimed that water charges were about water conservation - Fine Gael and, before it, Fianna Fáil - who slashed the capital investment programme in the austerity years by hundreds of millions of euro. When they got up time and again to justify household water charges, they would ask us to look at all the water that is leaking from the system, and look at how decrepit the water system is, while failing to mention that it was decisions made first by Fianna Fáil and then by Fine Gael to slash hundreds of millions from the capital investment programme in the austerity years that had worsened an already bad situation in that regard. That was then compounded by saying that, with the money available, we were going to pay Denis O'Brien to put in household meters which will not deal with any of that problem and will not compensate for the years of under-investment that they had worsened. I think the Comptroller and Auditor General would look at that and say it is not good value for money, and it might also raise questions about how Mr. Denis O'Brien got the contract, because that is also the kind of thing the Comptroller and Auditor General looks into.

When we think about the enormous expenditures beyond that to consultants, shocking money was spent on billing and administration and, of course, on obscene salaries, hourly rates and what-not for these consultants, who were brought in by Irish Water to set up the systems, there was enormous wastage. The public were horrified in so far as they were made aware of this. Indeed, what helped sink the already sinking ship of the water charges were the revelations about the extent of expenditures for the metering programme and on consultants. I think the Comptroller and Auditor General might have called a stop, or at least would have put question marks over all that expenditure and whether it represented good value for money. It is imperative, given the absolutely rotten record of Irish Water to date and its enormous wastage of money, that there be proper oversight and accountability for its expenditures of money. Obviously, the far better solution would be just to abolish it, full stop, but seeing the Government is not willing to do that, at the very least it could accept Deputy Murphy's amendment.

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