Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

It is incredible to listen to TD after TD from the Opposition but also from the Government give out about all the failures of Irish Water, which are very real, and appeal for intervention by the Minister. I will do the same in a moment, but it speaks to the failure of Irish Water as an institution, the only real rationale of which was to take the public assets previously in the hands of local authorities, tie them up in a bow and prepare them for privatisation. That plan, certainly of full-frontal privatisation, was stopped by a mass movement of protest and non-payment, but we are still dealing with a litany of failures by Irish Water as an organisation and a lack of investment over a long period.

I will give an example. Since last December, I have been trying to assist an elderly couple in Springfield in Tallaght who are continually having sewage from an Uisce Éireann pipe flow into their garden. They have been trying to no avail get Uisce Éirean-Irish Water to help them for over ten years. As the pipe passes through several people’s gardens, Uisce Éireann’s response has been to pass the buck and say it is not responsible, even though it is an Uisce Éireann pipe that is causing the problem. The council is no help to them either. On top of being totally unhelpful, Uisce Éireann has threatened this couple with criminal charges if they try to fix the source of the problem. Uisce Éireann is basically telling them to keep cleaning up the raw sewage, keep their mouths shut and stop annoying it. It is a totally unacceptable attitude from a public agency. Raw sewage flooding into anyone’s garden is an obvious health hazard. It is not just affecting the family I mentioned but their neighbours as well. I dealt with a very similar case just a year ago. It was the exact same situation and the same lack of response by Uisce Éireann. It is exactly the type of issue Uisce Éireann is meant to be dealing with. Will the Minister of State look into that and ensure Uisce Éireann does its job?

To go back to the broader point, on Tuesday night we heard from the Government that we should not worry as it does not have any plans to introduce excessive usage charges, which were stitched into the defeat of the water charges as a back door to try to bring water charges back at a later stage. However, at the same time, the Government refused to vote for legislation that would mean excess usage charges would be off the table and could not be introduced in future. People, therefore, would be right to be very suspicious of what the Government is doing. If it goes down that road, it will face a mass movement of opposition that will defeat it once again, so I advise it to give that up now. In an attempt to quell the anti-water charges movement last time around, a promise was made of a referendum to enshrine public ownership of our water in the Constitution. That was in the last programme for Government. It was not delivered and has been dropped from this programme for Government. It is a key issue for the water workers to know they are guaranteed that Irish Water-Uisce Éireann will not be privatised.

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