Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will be short. As others, I want to use the opportunity to congratulate the people who stood shoulder to shoulder on the streets of their estates to stop water meters being installed. Many were not engaged in any of that activity, including many of the people in the House and the Minister. The Minister must realise it was quite a sacrifice for people to get up at 5 or 5.30 in the morning, often in very dark and cold mornings, in all sorts of weather and mobilise with their neighbours to prevent the imposition of water meters in their estates. The Taoiseach would know all about people who get up early in the morning. This was done collectively through very peaceful civil disobedience.

I clearly remember a neighbour of mine called Sandra who spoke to me about a week after being engaged in this activity. She had been suffering from serious depression. Her mental health had gone down since she lost her job as a consequence of the collapse of the economy. I was interested to hear Deputy Cowen talk about the instability that those of us in the House who oppose water charges have brought to the country. It is really rich coming from somebody whose party brought the economy down around our ears with the banking collapse some years ago. One of the victims of that was Sandra who, a week after protesting against the metering in her estate, said her morale, dignity and self-esteem had been lifted completely as a result of this and she had stopped taking antidepressants.

That tells me that people who engage in shaping their own future by direct, collective action, by grouping together with others in solidarity, grow hugely, because they see they can have an impact on society and change it. They see that politics is more than the 15 minutes in a person's life that they will spend in a polling booth ticking 1, 2, 3 on a piece of paper. It means engagement, activity and trying to shape and determine the sort of society we want to live in. If it has done nothing else, the water charges movement has proved that. It has proved that people power, when inserted into the arguments and debates about the country, the world, and our economy can make a huge difference. Every individual who engages in that people power feels the difference. That lesson has been learned and will not go away.

In the first few months we spent here before Fine Gael formed some kind of Government with the backing of Fianna Fáil the discourse was that the centre must hold; it was more important than the disparity between left and right. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are doing everything they can to hold the centre. Hence this Bill, which leaves not just the back door but the window, the front door and the skylight open to bring in water charges at the next opportunity that the next Government gets. In the meantime, the victory lies with the people, the Sandras of this country, who fought locally in their estates and nationally by taking part in marches.

When we started out on this journey I was a councillor on Dublin City Council and when John Tierney got the job of heading up Irish Water, with a big increase in salary, up to €200,000, I believe we had a bit of a get together to say good luck to him. I remember very clearly saying to him, "Good luck in the war department because that is where you are going." He did not last very long in that department but the war department spent a fortune, through his leadership, on consultancies, on bringing in contractors, on the Denis O'Brien - not to mention his name - Siteserv exercise trying to put in meters, putting people in prison and through long trials such as the Jobstown trial. This has cost the country a fortune. The people have seen through it and have seen it down, albeit after enduring suffering and sacrifice.

Those of us who might remember Phil Hogan will remember that at the introduction of water charges, when he was Minister for the environment, he told everybody in this country that they would ultimately be paying between €500 and €600 a year for water. He then said if we did not comply with bringing in water meters and paying charges our water would have to be cut down to a trickle. He threatened at another stage to use the pay related social insurance, PRSI, of every man, woman and child, in every household, to get the cost of the water. All that has been rolled back to the point we are at now, and some in this House are boasting about it and about issuing cheques to people who paid their water charges in time for Christmas. This Government looks extremely foolish and it has been extremely foolish with our most precious natural resource. That is why I echo the call from other Deputies for a referendum to stop the privatisation of water. It is not just an add-on or extra, water is fundamental to life. We cannot survive without it. We can survive without food, as many hunger strikers have done for 70 or more odd days, but we would not last more than a week without water. As it is fundamental to life and as we hurtle towards climate change with water under more and more threat, it is absolutely essential that we do not privatise it and put it into the hands of the greedy Veolia, Thames and SUEZ companies which gain billions of dollars from the privatisation of water in some of the poorest countries in the world. That should never ever happen in this country. Resistance to it means not charging for water but paying for it from direct taxation, bringing in tax justice and making those who are not paying taxes, pay them. It has become absolutely apparent, as Deputy Boyd Barrett said, from the "Parasite" Papers that there is loads of money to be got from taxation. That taxation should be used to fund a service that is absolutely essential and crucial to this society. Hats off to every man, woman and child who engaged in the resistance to this most neo-liberal, objectionable move by this Government and the previous one. Until we get a proper socialist left wing government, I have no doubt it will continue with governments to come.

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