Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The McLoughlin report showed a 30% surplus of county managers, a 15% surplus of directors of services, a 10% surplus of corporate services staff and a 15% surplus of city managers. We took all of them and put them in Irish Water. The McLoughlin group reported in 2010, while the wastewater report was in 2008. A family of four on €100,000 earns six times the income of a person on €15,000. They pay 14 times more tax but they do not consume 14 times more water. That is why I saw people marching in Maynooth who cannot afford this money. The Minister has made it regressive by adopting this approach. Where it was financed through income tax, there was progressivity, as mentioned.

In the programme "This Week", it was stated that the cost of the metering programme had gone from €431 million to €539 million. Approximately 60% of water consumption in the UK is not metered. We appear to have made that a particular goal, and it is coming back to haunt us.

I am glad the Minister of State has tackled the allowance and bonus culture, and I said "Hear, hear" when he announced it. We have a managerialist organisation with low productivity and a PR strategy that seems to be loosely based on that of Vlad the Impaler, given the amount of damage it has done through public sector bodies. It needs a communications strategy and a reality strategy. It is unfortunate that we appear to have set aside all the rules for forming new bodies. A section in the guidelines for public expenditure issued by the Department of Finance in 2005 provides that all projects costing more than €20 million should be independently assessed. This organisation has grown out of control. I think the Government was hijacked by the managerialists who were promoting it within Irish local government. Certainly the Dáil was ignored and our amendments here were ignored. I can see that large crowds will be out protesting on 10 December 2014. The organisation has so many faults, which the Minister of State tried to address as best he could - I commend him on that - but the model chosen was so flawed that it has done serious damage to everybody in the Seanad and the Dáil, and that is why people took to the streets, some resorting to violence. All of that is a great pity. We all could and should have done this better in the past.