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

There is a contradiction at the heart of the Minister's response to the debate. On the one hand, he said that he has no intention of introducing a charge for so-called excessive use but when we gave him the opportunity to demonstrate that by deed and by removing the relevant provisions of the legislation, he refused to do so. Here is the genuine problem. Many people watching this debate will reach the conclusion that the Minister may not have an intention to introduce any form of water charges at this time but he wants to keep his options open and he wants to keep it on the Statute Book. That is the core of the problem. That is why people do not trust the Minister or his Government colleagues on this issue and that is why we have tabled this legislation.

He also accused us of wasting time. I do not mind him dismissing us. I am quite used to being dismissed by Members on that side of the House. However, when he uses that language in this important debate, he is also dismissing whether intentionally or otherwise the tens of thousands of people out there who when they read that article in the Irish Independent were genuinely deeply concerned that "oh no, here we go again. The Government is at it". I am not accusing the Minister of dismissing those people but that is what people will hear when he chooses that language.

He is right; there are some technical issues with our Bill. I make this point every time I introduce a Private Members' Bill. I do not have a team of civil servants. I do not have the luxury of expert drafting but those technical issues could be resolved by way of friendly amendments from the Government on Committee Stage without any problem and we would not object to that. The real issue is that the Minister does not want to remove this provision.

I also thought it was very telling that the Minister introduced a new phrase into the debate. Both the Minister and the Minister of State, Deputy O’Donnell, talked about a water conservation charge. That is not what is in the legislation and, as he knows, that is not the language that was in the 2018 report of the committee on the future funding of water services. In fact, the very proposition of a charge for so-called excessive use was not even in the conservation chapter of that report. The whole debate about a charge was in the context of compliance with the water services directive. There was a view, which we disagreed with, that in order to comply with the directive there had to be some form of charge. It is very telling that nowhere in the very detailed chapter 5, with its recommendations, was there any talk of a charge. This is because the charge for so-called excessive use is not a conservation measure, given that there is no evidence from Irish Water or elsewhere that the 10% of households that have larger-than-average uses of water are wilfully wasting water. In fact, I suspect many of them are pensioners living in very old homes with old water systems who do not have the money to upgrade them or people who bought Celtic tiger-era defective homes with significant leakages.

The Minister claimed that the Government had recommended the key recommendations of chapter 5 of the report. As somebody who drafted those and argued tooth and nail to get them into the report, I challenge him to say that is not the case. Let me correct the record. The Minister said on the one hand that there was the national leakage programme. That was in place before we made the report. We wanted that to be increased and accelerated. That has not happened. The Minister said the report called for the keeping of the first fix free scheme. That is not what the report says. We want it expanded to include the possibility of doing works within the curtilage of private property where the owners did not have the financial means to do so. He talked about awareness promoting through the funding of An Taisce. That programme has been in place since 2013. What we called for was in addition to existing programmes. The Minister also failed to mention some of the most important recommendations of chapter 5, those being, changes to planning, building control and greater supports for people who want to retrofit their own homes to have greater water conservation. Almost every one of the substantive recommendations of that report have been ignored by successive Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Governments. For the Minister to come here and read out a note from his officials to claim otherwise is unacceptable.

I will turn to the big threats. The Minister is right that we have very significant threats but that does not diminish the importance of this issue in the context of a cost-of-living crisis where some of those threats could result in increased cost-of-living pressures. What are the real threats facing our economy and our society? Over the weekend, Davy stockbrokers complained that the impact of failed Government housing policy on our economic competitiveness was a bigger threat than Trump’s tariffs. I am not saying I agree with that but that is what it said. Today, myhome.ie and Bank of Ireland are saying the way in which this Government has pushed house prices to extraordinary highs means we have an additional layer of vulnerability if the tariffs introduced wrongly by Donald Trump have the impact many of us expect. One of the reasons we are all so concerned about those tariffs is that the way in which Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have managed the economy for decades has left us over-reliant on one economic sector in terms of growth and, particularly, tax revenue. We are more vulnerable to the impact of tariffs, and counter-tariffs if they are got wrong, than many of our competitors. We should debate those issues, but we should also debate this, too. The fact that the Government has taken a decision to oppose the Bill despite the fact that the Minister says it has no intention of introducing such a charge leaves the question open: what has it really got planned? That is why the people do not trust the Government. That is why we were right to table this Bill and the Government was wrong to oppose it.

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