Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State and I appreciate his commitment in this regard. He and the Minister, Deputy Kelly, probably got to this issue too late as the bandwagon was up and running. I admire what the Minister of State has tried to do and I have complimented the Minister as well in this regard.

I objected to this section, which outlines that one person will pay €160, two or more people will pay €260 and children will not be given the full adult allowance. How do we finance the water system, as the Minister asks us to? We address the €2 billion that Professor John FitzGerald has estimated for the excess of personnel. The Secretary General of the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government sat on the McLoughlin review which indicated massive over-manning at director of services level and county manager level. We have shunted all of those people into this quango and are asking old people living in the country to pay €260 because we want to maintain this bureaucracy. The investment record was hopeless but we did not ask engineers to explain how water supplies had cryptosporidium. We have decided to blame old people in the country because the county engineers have not been up to the standards we want. We have let these people off the hook far too much. We heard much about waste but we found out yesterday that only 6% of the waste is in houses. All of the rest was down to the county engineer. There is the scandal of bonus payments and expenses and we must tackle the cost base of Irish Water before imposing a burden on low-income people.

There were start-up costs of €168 million, with €500 million for meters and €2 billion arising from over-manning of posts. All these are being visited on low-income people, which is why they protested outside. The Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government is being towed around backwards by water engineers who have not been called to account. We need far more accountability in Irish life, including among economists, but definitely among water engineers. We should not argue that the system is useless when those engineers collected fancy pay, increments and benchmarking. There was not much money left to spend on pipes but the bloated bureaucracy of local government in Ireland did very well for itself. Elected representatives should tackle the issue. This is where we could get the money required. The Taoiseach argued that the savings in the budget would be gone if we did not impose water charges but maybe that would be a more progressive approach. Let us see the numbers. Perhaps we will see benefits at some stage but there is a fear about what will happen with these charges, and that is what concerns people.

I will return to the tremendous support that this House received from working class people in Dublin. All the constituencies were wonderful and they stood by this House, so I am calling on this House to stand by them now and not to impose charges on them. They were wonderful and we would not be here if it were not for low-income urban people in Dublin, who sometimes voted against the advice of every single Deputy. They want the Seanad to do something for them.