Jim Walsh (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On this section I will take a different view from what others may put forward. The difficulty with the imposition of this charge is the fact that it is coming on top of a ream of charges, stealth taxes, that have been applied over the past six years which has brought people to a position where they simply cannot afford to pay. That is the issue before the House. My concern is that the late payment charge is watering down, pardon the pun, the incentive for people to meet the charge. Senator Sean D. Barrett rightly said there will be two categories who will not pay - those who cannot afford to pay and those who simply will not pay under any circumstances. There will always be an element of that. In fact there are three categories. The third category is the one about which I am concerned - those who will pay. If the predictions in the various polls being conducted are correct at between 60% and 75%, it means there will be very significant default in regard to the charges. I heard what the Minister of State said about the imposition of the property tax and the fact that people responded. People only responded when they discovered the powers of Revenue for recovery. Revenue could go directly to people's bank accounts if they were in default incurring the sanctions and penalties which are onerous and, probably, too onerous. In this instance there is not a great financial incentive for those who decide not to pay to change their minds. The consequence of that will be that the people who pay will incur a much higher charge going forward that they would otherwise. We need to know what the Minister intends to do to ensure that if the charge is applied that it will done fairly. Fairly means that the burden should not fall on a certain section of society who pay everything, the people who pay all their taxes and who do not rely on the State for their medical costs. They are the people who have been crucified by the Minister's colleague, the Minister for Health, by the imposition of public bed charges imposed on private health insurance which has seen a huge escalation in the health insurance costs which has lead to a haemorrhaging of about 300,000 people from private health insurance. The time has come for politicians of all hue, and particularly the Government, to stand up for the hard-pressed people who will drive any recovery. They are the people in the middle class who share the burden of everything that is imposed by Government. This Government has done so without any recognition of the hardships and difficulties they have incurred. There should be an offset for those people if the Minister is to continue with the water charges.

An obvious way of doing that would be to gradually remove the universal social charge. When that charge was introduced by the late Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, he clearly explained that it was an emergency measure aimed at fixing the fiscal deficit. It was temporary and the intention was to remove it as the economy recovered and our fiscal circumstances improved. That was a commitment to the Irish people on the part of the State but it has been abandoned by this Government. The Minister of State, Deputy Coffey, spoke about the need to support the Government in its efforts to save this country. I was in this Chamber when the Minister of State was an Opposition Senator. He and his colleagues in Fine Gael and the Labour Party opposed almost every measure the then Government took between 2008 and 2011 to address the greatest emergency this State since 1922. It rings hollow now to hear such urging from the Minister of State, when he previously opposed measures for political reasons even though his opposition was detrimental to the interests of the Irish people.

I ask the Minister to bring this back to the drawing board and to defer any further imposition on the Irish people until such time as the measures have been thought through. I do not object to water charges in principle but in the current circumstances they are the straw that breaks the camel's back. An offset should be provided to allow the people to see that while a new charge is being imposed on the one hand, the severe emergency measures introduced previously will be ameliorated on the other. There are many areas in which we need to take account of the difficulties people are experiencing. We have an opportunity to take the first step in that regard. It would add insult to injury for those who have signed up already and who pay everything if a significant cohort are happy to trawl along on their coat tails. That is not good enough. I refer to people who pay for their children's education without getting grants and who subscribe to the Exchequer to meet the cost of the public service. Many of them are on salaries and remuneration packages far less generous than those paid to the Members of this House and many people at medium to senior level in the public service. None of them get the benefit of the pension scheme we enjoy as public servants. It is not good enough for us to abandon their interests.

The water charge is relatively small compared to the other impositions on these people since the emergency began in 2008. I remind the Minister of State, Deputy Coffey, that more than two thirds of the heavy lifting were done in the €20 billion correction of the fiscal deficit made by the previous Government, for which it received nothing but opposition and criticism throughout its period in office. Fine Gael and the Labour Party were left with the smaller proportion of adjustments.