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

I thank the Minister of State. When the Right to Water movement was campaigning against the then Fine Gael-Labour Government's attempts to privatise our water services one of the many concerns we had at that time was the decision of that Government to locate the water utility in Ervia. In fact the view at the time was Ervia being the most commercialised of the then Government's State companies it would be the ideal place to frame the development of the emerging water utility in a way that would make it most conducive to privatisation. It is with some degree of satisfaction for many of us, when we heard former Deputy Eoghan Murphy a number of years ago announce the eventual separation of the utility from Ervia. It caused significant consternation in Ervia and indeed among some of the trade unions because they had not been consulted. However, as many of us have long argued if there is to be a stand-alone public utility managing the essential resource of public water, a stand-alone non-commercial publicly-owned entity is the best possible model.

The Minister of State is right, we did conduct pre-legislative scrutiny. It is probably not accurate to say the majority of our recommendations are in the Bill because we only made three recommendations. One of those three recommendations is in the Bill. I will go through them in a moment. While I have a wider set of concerns that I am going to raise during my shared time, Sinn Féin will not be opposing this legislation.

One of the recommendations from our committee was that members of the board would be appointed through the public appointments service. That is not explicitly required in the Bill. It has been the practice of the current Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage to use the Public Appointments Service for most board appointments to date. The difficulty is of course that if it is not in the legislation it is not legally required. Therefore, either this Minister or a future Minister could choose otherwise and that is a mistake which the Government should reconsider on Report Stage. I welcome the fact that the chief executive and chairperson of the utility will be held as accountable persons for the purpose of attending the Committee of Public Accounts. That is welcome.

The third recommendation we made was that in parallel with the publication of the Bill the Minister would publish an updated statement on the outcome or the negotiations between workers and their unions, the County and City Management Association, CCMA, the Department and Ervia on the Workplace Relations Commission talks. While some of that documentation has been published particularly the industrial relations component of it, Document No. 2 which deals with the wider public policy issues which many of us are concerned about has not been published. Of course it is in wide circulation. I encourage the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, to ask his officials to put it up on the website because then it would be available to everybody. In fact the absence of the publication of that document in an updated statement from the Minister of State is in my view disappointing.

In regard to those wider issues, while the separation of the utility from Ervia in itself is not a problem, it is clearly part of what the Government calls the transition to a single water utility. It is required under the current plan and it was motivated and provoked by that. Therefore it is proper that this House has a discussion on the outcome of those Workplace Relations Commission negotiations and in particular how that could impact on public policy concerns in regard to delivery of domestic drinking water and wastewater and related matters. We have been following that process very closely in the Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage. We have held a number of hearings both in the last Dáil and this, listening to what the trade unions, Ervia, Irish Water and the CCMA may have had to say about the matter. During all of that time and to the present, our position has been as follows. It is not our business as a political party to interfere in the industrial relations negotiations between workers and their trade union representatives and the employer.

Those are therefore matters for the participants to those talks and they can make their views known on that very clearly. We welcome the fact there are no involuntary transfers required under that agreement and that there are no compulsory redundancies. That is a commitment that was given by the previous Minister and this Minister, and they have been true to their word. We are conscious that there has been a very significant criticism of those aspects of the deal which deal with workers' terms and conditions, some of which we have seen in the media recently.

One of the particular concerns of those workers is a genuinely held belief that for those workers who opt to remain in the local authorities that their full terms and conditions as they are currently experiencing them will not necessarily translate if they remain or are redeployed elsewhere. If that is not the case, it would be very helpful for the Minister to clarify that today or at a later stage, because that is obviously a very important piece of information for anybody considering the option of transfer or of remaining.

The biggest concern of those workers who have been raising their voices in recent weeks has been a lack of clarity around the referendum. The Minister confirmed once again that no Government decision has been made. We do not even know if the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage intends to bring forward a memo to Cabinet on the holding of a referendum this year and that is one of the fundamental flaws in document No. 2, the unpublished document that has come out of the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC. Sinn Féin’s view is very clear. We are completely convinced of the merits of holding a referendum as soon as possible to enshrine public ownership of our water system, its ownership, management and investment, in public hands.

If the Government proposes such a referendum and works with us, either on the wording proposed by Deputy Joan Collins and endorsed by a majority this House as far back as 2016, or on an improved wording, we will be happy to campaign alongside it on that. However, I am a sceptic as to whether or not this Government will agree to hold a referendum on the right to housing in the Constitution, where such a thing was recommended by the Housing Commission, or indeed on public ownership of water but we will wait to see what happens.

We also have a strong concern with the lack of clarity in document No. 2 on the legal status of the entity. It does appear that it will be public but it is not sure if is commercial or non-commercial, or of what the standing of future employees of that utility will be, and whether they will have the same rights, entitlements and terms and conditions of existing Irish Water workers, or workers who may transfer from local authorities to the new single utility at a later stage. Again, clarity on that from the Minister would be helpful.

There is also the enormous concern once again of the hollowing out of services provided by our local authorities. There were eminently sensible proposals by SIPTU during the course of the WRC negotiations to have what it called a National Transport Authority-type arrangement where big strategic cross-local authority boundaries of water infrastructure issues would be dealt with by the utility, but there would be a continued responsibility for some levels of local water services provision remaining within the local authority. That is obviously not the outcome of the WRC talks but there is still the question of whether the staff employed by the new utility will have a continued footprint in the offices and the depots of the local authorities. That would be eminently valuable. People have an affinity and a local connection with the local authority. They know who to ring and who to talk to. Particularly, where things go wrong, water services employees while under a service-line agreement with Irish Water are employed by the local authorities and know the lay of the land. They have the local, historical and institutional memory which is absolutely vital. Therefore, while there are again some ambiguous commitments in document No. 2, the future relationship between the single utility and the local authorities is not yet clear and the sooner that we have clarity from the Minister on that, the better it is for all of us.

I say the following to the Minister. There is nothing offensive in this legislation and there is certainly nothing that I would object to in the text as is proposed. Those wider issues, however, are completely crucial and the sooner the Minister can publish that document and perhaps even clarify aspects of that document for water services workers and local authorities, but also for citizens and residents of the State who depend on water services as provided, the better for all of us.

To conclude, Sinn Féin remains as committed today as we were in 2013 and 2014 to the core principles of the Right2Water movement. We believe that the fact that that movement won the core elements of that campaign were very important. We do not have domestic meter water charges and that is a good thing. Water should be free at the point of access and funded through general taxation and low interest Government borrowing. That is the best route to ensuring that we have and continue to have zero water poverty, something which is the envy of most European countries.

We are also completely convinced of the need to ensure that any utility is publicly owned, publicly controlled and accountable, not just to the Minister and the Government, but to Members of this House and to the Oireachtas committee. So long as those principles are enshrined, along with the referendum and a non-commercial semi-State company with full protection for all current and future workers, with a continued footprint of water services personnel in a local authorities in local government, then I believe we can have a significant improvement in services.

I look forward to any future clarification from the Minister. We will deal with some technical elements of the Bill, which need further teasing out on Committee Stage, but at this point we are happy to support the proposition as tabled today.

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