Paudie Coffey (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I welcome the Minister and his officials to the House. I have the greatest of respect for Senator Murnane O'Connor but I will not allow the rewriting of history on what she described as the "water fiasco". First, if one looks at the Fianna Fáil record on water services in this country, we were spending in excess of €1 billion of public money annually and more than half the water was leaking into the ground, there was pollution in rivers and lakes and along the coastline, and our water infrastructure was a shambles. Second, in 2008, Fianna Fáil signed this country up in an agreement with the Troika to water charges of €400 annually per household. It bankrupted the country and tried to abolish the utility, Irish Water, which is the solution to all the problems we are hearing about.