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

Many points have been made but it is worth underlining that if one talks to people in the local authorities, and this is true with regard to both housing and water, they always know what needs to be done. The problem has been that they were not resourced to do it. There are not enough people employed in the local authorities because we have run down the staffing numbers, particularly of outdoor workers directly employed to do work such as identifying leaks and fixing them. The capital investment programme was chronically deficient and, as I mentioned earlier, it was slashed by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael successively in the aftermath of 2008. The slashing of the capital investment programme to upgrade the water infrastructure, which is Victorian and decrepit, and running down the number of directly employed outdoor workers in water departments in local authorities are the problems. That is why we have a problem. If the Government was serious about dealing with the water infrastructure, which it never was, it would be employing lots of people to fix the water mains. They would be directly employed by the local authorities, where the expertise is.

The SLAs between Irish Water and the local authorities proved all of this. It was a complete joke. We set up this quango, paid millions of euro to Denis O'Brien to install meters and paid tens of millions of euro to consultants for billing and their big salaries. It was all a waste. What we needed to do, as Irish Water ultimately did, was go to the local authorities and ask them to do the work. However, it is now more inefficient because there is another layer, a quango called Irish Water, leaching money out of the system but handing the work back to the local authorities anyway. It is just laughable. It is another proof, as it were, that Irish Water was never about dealing with those problems, because they could and should be dealt with directly via the local authorities being resourced and staffed, but was always about something else, which was setting up a company that could get revenue from water charging and ultimately move towards privatisation. A proper audit of what must be done to deal with the massive amount of unaccounted for water and putting the resources into the local authorities to do that work is the way to deal with the problem.

On the conservation grant, I wish to underline that Solidarity-People Before Profit is the only party that has included an allocation of €100 million for a water conservation grant in its pre-budget submissions for the last three years. No other party has done so. The Government introduced a water conservation grant which was not linked to water conservation measures. It was nothing but a bribe. It gave the money to try to soften the bitter pill of domestic water charges. We have proposed a water conservation grant which would be given to households that carry out water conservation measures such as retrofitting their houses and so forth to put in systems that would reduce their usage of treated water. If the Government is to be believed, and whatever I might think about Deputy Eoghan Murphy's bona fides, I do not credit the Government's bona fides on this matter at all. To use less colourful language than I used earlier, where is the conservation grant if it cares about this? It is not there; it is not even in the Government's head. If it was serious about this stuff it would support the introduction of a genuine conservation grant linked to and supporting householders who are trying to install water conservation measures.

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