Marc MacSharry (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. He is a former colleague here and I wish him well in his portfolio. I do not doubt his personal commitment to this and other issues under his Department's aegis.

Irish Water has been an unmitigated disaster, however. I disagree fundamentally with the introduction of charges, as well as with the establishment of Irish Water. This is an idea that goes back to 2009 concerning the establishment of a super-quango, which was in the Fine Gael manifesto. The Labour Party had to swallow it, and here we are today. In any event, it is not a policy of mine and not one that I intend to support. My major problem - I have used this analogy a couple of times - is that we have established a McAlpine to build a tree house. We set up this €50-million-a-year wage structure to effectively do the same thing.

The Minister of State said the abolition of water charges would lead us back to that old, broken system, with 50% of the water leaking into the ground. For the record, let us use Sligo - where I come from - as an example. Two years ago, the people of Sligo were being provided with water by the local authority in Sligo. One lady, called Kathleen McTiernan, was the go-to person on all issues, and that was the case up to recently. Two years later, what is the difference? We have spent €600 million on meters that are sitting in the ground. They will not be used until 2019 at the earliest, and possibly after that, according to the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan. We have spent €170 million on consultants and other things, as well as €46 million on salaries, all to do the same job that Kathleen McTiernan and her colleagues were doing in Sligo County Council. Is the infrastructure any better in Sligo since the establishment of Irish Water and the expenditure of all this money? No, it is not. Is the water any less in need of boiling in Roscommon or other counties throughout the country? No, it is not. Therefore, why did we establish Irish Water in the first place? As is so often the case in Irish politics, we put the cart before the horse. We ought to have restored the network to a 21st century standard. The Minister of State spoke about water utilities in other countries, but maybe they were dealing with a blank canvas. Perhaps they put a state-of-the-art infrastructure in place before they charged people for the stuff. They did not, however, set up some gilt-edged company in an ivory tower down in Cork where people have to pay for €46 million in salaries and bonuses. I appreciate that the Minister of State said they had postponed the bonuses, but he can assume they will be paid, because that is what trade unionism is all about. That is the reality of industrial relations.

It has been an unmitigated disaster. The Minister of State is wrong in saying that it will lead us back to that old place, but where is he talking about? Eight hundred million euro ago, we were getting exactly the same services we are getting today. The costs were outlined by the Minister of State today and by his ministerial colleague last week.

There is not an additional cent going into capital infrastructure. None whatsoever. In fact, the income base has now gone to €300 million gross, €46 million of which goes into salaries, bonuses and God knows what else. To use Sligo as an example again, what about the upgrade to the Grange, Strandhill or Tubbercurry sewage treatment plants? They were originally approved in 2007 and subvention was to be provided by the Government of the day. Now one must get on a phone and one will hear "Press 1 if you are over 18, press 2 if you are male and Caucasian, press 5 if whatever" and will go around in circles, because there is no Kathleen McTiernan, like there was in Sligo, whom one could ring and find out exactly where one stood, for relatively modest expenditure. Instead, we went the old "establish McAlpine and build a treehouse" approach, where we are going to throw good money after bad. Previous Governments did too. Is this Fine Gael and the Labour Party's voting machines? I think it is. We have all these meters in the ground, which we will not use. There is nothing to do with conservation and nothing to tell the people of the three areas I mentioned - Grange, Tubbercurry and Strandhill in Sligo - that now that we have Irish Water those three sewage treatment plants will be up and running faster. There is not a hope of that.

The other fantasy that was talked about last week is that the onus is now on landlords to collect money from the deposits of tenants who do a runner. That is a joke. Nobody knows anything in the Department. The PRTB is a disgrace. It might look after some tenant issues, but I gave the example to the other Minister on the Order of Business the other week of a tenant that was in a place for three and a half years and paid no rent, just the deposit of one month's rent. I must declare my interest in the matter as an auctioneer. We went to the PRTB and that is how long it took to get them out of the house. The house was wrecked. No recompense was given to the landlord and the tenant walked straight into a council house. Landlords and anyone who is renting a house around the country knows about this. They have all experienced the tenant who says "Ah, yeah, I'm not paying my last month's rent - take it out of my deposit".