Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and wish him the best in trying to tidy up this mess. It is a mess that has brought Leinster House into disrepute. Nothing else brought 130,000 people on to the streets. We tried to table amendments with the Minister's predecessor and, as always, the Leader allowed full discussion, but it turned out that he was never formally allocated responsibility for the area, as claimed by the then Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Fergus O'Dowd, and he had no ability to accept amendments. I attended the banking inquiry this morning. I think water will do for this Government what banking did for the previous one. It has brought us all into disrepute, because we have ignored so many obvious faults and flaws, although the Minister has addressed some of them. Let us look at the newspaper headlines: "Irish Water allowances 'are flawed' "; "Water watchdog staff net almost €1m in bonuses"; "Coalition will not survive water debacle"; "Irish Water taps up extra staff"; "Irish Water will cost twice as much as in UK"; "Irish Water has been exempted from paying an annual rates bill of €59m"; "€420k car perk for water bosses".
This has been such a disaster that we should stop it now. Let us look at all the mistakes we have made. We put it on top of the local authority structure. The McLoughlin report found there was a 30% surplus of county managers, a 15% surplus of directors of services, a 10% surplus of corporate services staff, a 10% surplus of planning staff and a 15% surplus of city managers, and to this we added 900 staff, most of whom, according to the media, were not recruited by open competition. We have 4,000 people doing the work of 2,400. That is the burden that will be passed on for the future.
Irish Water is completely flawed in its concept. We have been told by Deputies and Senators that it is off-balance-sheet. Would you buy a used car from a guy who asks to keep it off-balance-sheet? I am not sure it is off-balance-sheet or whether the idea has any validity. Let us have public accounts that reflect the reality of what we are spending and stop seeking accountancy tricks which many people doubt will get past the EU.
Let us look also at some of the offers we rejected. The Sunday Independentof 24 April 2012 reported that Siemens Ireland boss Mr. Werner Kruckow offered meters to the Green Party. Apparently, the then Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, John Gormley, was willing to accept them, but his successor, Mr. Phil Hogan, did not pursue that offer. We have spent more than half a billion euro on meters. In the UK system, 60% of houses have no meters. Why is it that the money spent on meters was not spent on fixing the pipes?
In regard to the first set of untruths by the proposers - "We have to pay for water," and "We never paid for it" - we pay very large amounts of taxation for water. I will give the reasons why paying through general taxation is a good way to do it. We have now imposed a poll tax; the charge is the same for everybody, unlike income tax, whereby a family of four on €100,000 pays about 14 times more than one on €15,000. We have created a Mrs.-Thatcher-style poll tax-----