John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I propose an amendment to the Order of Business that the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Fergus O'Dowd, come to the House to clarify the position on water tax. I am not naive; water is not free and, ultimately, comes from nature. The provision of infrastructure to deliver it safely to people's houses incurs a cost and society must tackle the issue. Currently, directly or indirectly, the cost is met from the taxes we pay to central government and the money is given to local authorities to arrange for water to be delivered. We are, therefore, paying for it from the public purse. Reports in the past few days suggest there will be a large fixed charge of between €250 and €500 per household to meet the infrastructural costs of delivery, with additional costs being based on usage. That is fine and I have no problem with it, if there is a complete 100% write-off of the fixed charge against the other taxes we already pay. If we are now paying the money to the Government and it is using it to provide water for us and if we will now provide it directly for whatever water authority will provide water, what will happen to the money we pay in tax which is going to the water authority? I can tell Members right now that unless we have some clear-cut evidence that some part of the redundant public service - I am not referring to essential public services - will actually be curtailed and that the money will be saved, to me the logical conclusion is that whatever one will pay in water charges, there should be a 100% write-off against tax. That is the only fair way to do it and the debate needs to be started.

Similarly, in the case of universal health insurance which I have been espousing for 21 odd years - sometimes very odd years in this country - I was delighted that the Government parties had assumed the mantle of reform prior to the last general election when they stated they would bring forward such an initiative. However, I am troubled by some of the ways it is being described. There is talk about a new system which will prevent people from skipping queues, but under that system there should be no queues. There is a matching of resource with demand which will have to be policed or appropriately regulated. In systems which provide for this kind of health insurance people do not face queues anymore. Similarly, having regard to what I said about water charges, if there was a mandatory insurance charge, the money currently given to the central Exchequer to fund the health service should be written off 100% against whatever one would pay for universal health insurance. That would mean that there would be redundancies and people in the Civil Service would seek alternative employment because currently they are channelling money from the general Exchequer into the health service. The vast bureaucracy which does this would instead find the money going directly to insurance companies, I hope in most cases to not-for-profit social insurance companies but in some cases to private insurance companies.

The idea that people would pay twice for the same service is absolutely irrational and it shows me that this process is not being thought through at the highest level.

I had occasion recently to hear a number of presentations from Indian cancer specialists and I was horrified to hear that the second largest cause of cancer death in women in India is cancer of the cervix, a disease which is almost completely preventable - 80% preventable with the widespread application of a vaccine - but they cannot provide it because of cost. I did the arithmetic and there is an exact, neat correlation between what we paid every year to bail out Anglo Irish Bank and what it would cost to eradicate cervical cancer for one year in India.