Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Sinn Féin wholeheartedly opposes this section. This is the fourth attempt by the Government to push through legislation on water services without support from the general public. When one traces back the arguments for introducing Irish Water in the first place, it was about water conservation. I remember that argument from the Minister of State’s former colleague, Phil Hogan. He was rewarded with a nice Commissioner job in Europe for pushing through Uisce Éireann as a conservation measure.

The Government is pushing forward with a regime of putting in water meters to use them almost as cash registers to take money from people in years to come. Requesting people to register with Irish Water has been a debacle from day one, which is quite obvious from the hundreds of thousands of people who marched on the streets against it and the continuing Right to Water campaign. At this late stage, the Government should back off on the whole charges for Irish Water.

Sinn Féin is proposing to delete the existing proposal regarding the obligation to register with Irish Water. The services being provided are clearly inadequate and no one should have to register until a proper service has been provided. Today, Leenane, which Senator Cáit Keane would know quite well, has been served with a boil water notice because of cryptosporidium. Up to now Irish Water could have blamed the local authorities around these issues but cryptosporidium, however, is unacceptable. I have warned about it before and have called on several occasions here in debates and on Commencement matters for barriers to be put in place to protect the water supply in Leenane and Carraroe. It is clear Irish Water is not putting in any investment, which we were promised.It has certainly done the opposite in Connemara where I live and we had plans for a regional water scheme in Casla which would have given us a clean supply of water in the Ceantar na nOileán-Carraroe-Rosmuc area. What did Irish Water do? It scrapped the plan. We are now drinking water from a lake that is polluted and where there is no barrier to cryptosporidium, of which there could be outbreak at any time. Time and again, THM levels in the water exceed the allowable levels, but Irish Water is long-fingering resolution of the issue. Today, the people of Leenane are boiling water. The investment that was supposed to be made and the great salvation that Irish Water was supposed to be are fallacies. This measure has been foisted on the Government by the troika and EU partners to put cash registers outside people's doors on their water pipes in order that in the future the cost of supplying water can be increased, even though we already pay through a number of taxes.

We totally oppose the policy brought forward by the Government and promise that Sinn Féin in government will scrap water charges and reconfigure Irish Water as a public utility, as it should be. It has been an absolute disgrace from day one. The Minister keeps moving the goal posts. The different deadlines for registration and the payment of bills had to be moved further out. The Government has tried all kinds of tactic - carrots and sticks - including the introduction of the so-called conservation grant to get people to buy into the misguided principle behind Irish Water, but they have not bought it, as the Government knows. It has bullied a lot of people into registering but not enough. Even at this late stage, it will have major issues in trying to keep Irish Water off balance sheet. It is costing us more to collect the charges than Irish Water will bring in. Surely even the Minister must admit at this stage that it has been an abject failure on the part of the Government and that, as a Labour Party Minister, he should agree that water charges are not the way to go. People cannot bear the expense that will be put on them by this and future Governments through water metering. That is why we are opposed to the section.