Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. This is an issue that brought 100,000 people onto the streets. Looking at the record of this Government, which has much to commend it in many ways, this was the low point. It really annoyed the citizens and I am not so sure that the annoyance is at all gone away. Last week we had the Ombudsman complaining that he is not allowed to investigate Irish Water. There were more comments in another paper about the level of consultancy fees that Irish Water charges.

The tax system is a poll tax. Paying for water through progressive taxation, going by the budgets of this Government, would involve people on €100,000 paying about six times more in taxes than people on €20,000. The poll tax aspect has annoyed people. I was at one of the Maynooth marches against water charges and there were people who genuinely did not have €160 to spare. That is why they objected. "We never paid before" is a completely fallacious argument. We paid our taxes and the Exchequer ran a surplus for ten years. The water industry in Ireland was unable to prepare proper projects to submit to the Department of Finance. It wanted its own exchequer and invented this. The issue has seriously damaged the Government in many ways.

We also took on the surplus staff. John FitzGerald of the ESRI has commented on that; there are probably about 4,000 people doing the work of 2,000. The McLoughlin report on local government, which was published in 2010, estimated that there was a 30% surplus in county managers, a 20% surplus in directors of services, a 15% surplus in senior and middle managers and a 10% surplus in corporate service staff.It was recommended that there be 15% reduction in staffing in Dublin and Cork. All those people were transferred, which was a major mistake. It was documented and the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government knew very well the extent of the over-manning.

Another unacceptable act was to put the onus on the consumer because water was being wasted. The idea was that if there was a charge for water, consumers would not be as wasteful. More than 90% of the waste occurred within the province of the county engineer and blaming little old ladies for drinking too much water or having too many baths and putting the onus on them was completely wrong. Leitrim was one of the best counties for not wasting water, as it had a figure of 36.5% for wasted water. The worst area was Roscommon, as has been mentioned, with 58% of the water wasted. It was wasted by the people employed in the water sector.

We decided to have a national quango that has hired extra staff and public relations personnel, with a large cost base. That has been well documented but why did we do it? The least amount of waste was in Fingal, which is right beside County Meath, with a figure of 21.6%, whereas Meath had a rate of 47.6% for waste, which was 2.2 times the amount in Fingal. We abolished both local water authorities. Why did we not take the efficient local water authorities and allow them to run the inefficient bodies? I gave an example of two authorities beside each other and where there was a vast difference in the amount of water wasted by each.

We did not research the project properly and it is financed in a way that is extremely regressive. The organisation has increased expenditure, overheads and the number of consultants, which has annoyed the Irish public like nothing else has done in the past number of years. This has damaged the Government's reputation among the public. It was a mistake and this should never again be the model for setting up any quango. There were local authorities which could do the job properly and there were those which could not. How could we reform the bodies not doing the job properly? If the bodies were over-manned, everybody should not have been given the guarantee of a job and a headquarters should not be set up, with corporate image consultants and major legal and accountancy firms. That was completely unnecessary. Trying to get this off balance sheet was an economic con job that was disallowed by EUROSTAT in any case.

I agree that we must properly invest in water but this is a crazy way of charging for water and this is a crazy organisation set up to do that. A recent opinion poll indicated that this is the most unpopular organisation in the public or private sector by miles in the country. I do not feel any need to defend it, although I would defend many things that this Government has had to do. Irish Water was its biggest mistake.