I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." The Bill we put before the Dáil tonight would scrap water charges for good and would prevent this Government and, indeed, any future government from charging workers and families for household water. Recent reports in the newspapers that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were conniving in the background to reimpose water charges by the back door have sounded alarm bells for many people. These alarm bells cannot be ignored. This has not come from nowhere, as the Minister knows, and significant work was done by his predecessors in the last Government, along with the Department and Uisce Éireann. It seems that the preparation work continues to be done to dust off the Government's plan from 2017 for a so-called excessive use charge. Of course, people know and understand that this is nothing more than a Trojan Horse for what would eventually be widespread domestic water charges for people connected to the public water system. The Minister also knows from his own constituency and elsewhere that people are struggling with soaring costs of living and are being hammered with rip-off bills right across the board. Households are under huge pressure just to afford the basics and it would be totally unacceptable that any section of our society would be hit with more unfair bills. I am absolutely confident that working people will see through any effort to charge them for water. I am confident that they will, if needs be, protest and campaign against water charges with everything they have got. When reports of the Government planning to reintroduce water charges appeared in the media, the Minister was very quick onto the airwaves to dismiss this suggestion. The problem is that many people simply do not believe him. They do not trust Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael on this issue because of hard-learned experience, and I have to say that I agree with them. The Government parties' track record speaks for itself. For over a decade if not for more, the Minister's party along with Fine Gael have worked together hand in glove through repeated attempts to force domestic water charges on people across the State. Of course, thankfully, the people fought back in record numbers. In their hundreds of thousands, people across the South of Ireland protested against water charges. We marched, we protested and we campaigned through a long hard campaigning slog and ultimately we defeated the charge. The Right2Water movement, which opposed not just domestic metered water charges but the privatisation of Irish Water and the introduction of water poverty, was a stand-out success for people and people power. People from all walks of life and from all political backgrounds and none, urban and rural, came together and simply said "No". They came together to stop Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in their tracks and in 2016 the issue was definitively decided, and they forced a monumental climbdown by Government. However, despite that success, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, during the confidence and supply arrangement, put together an agreement that sought to introduce water charges through the back door. I was a member of the committee-----

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I have five minutes, if that is okay.

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The Ceann Comhairle is okay. I was a member of that committee and I sat through the sessions. It was clear that rather than deal with the very substantive issues many of us put on the table, like water conservation, education and changes to planning and building control, the Government simply wanted a mechanism to reintroduce domestic metered water charges. It came up with a proposition of so-called excessive use. Thankfully, that was not introduced immediately afterwards but we saw last year Uisce Éireann publish the water services plan, which included the proposed charge for so-called excessive use. As the Minister knows, at the centre of the media controversy was that his first day brief from the officials included that. The purpose of the Bill is very straightforward. If the Government wants us and the wider public to believe it that it has no intention to introduce this charge, then vote for this Bill. Why? It is because this Bill removes Part 2 from the 2017 Water Services Act which empowers Uisce Éireann to introduce that charge. If it is really the Government's position that it has no plans at this or any other time to introduce such a charge, we ask it to support this Bill and to put the matter to bed once and for all. If it does not, it will confirm among a large section of the public that, in fact, it does not mean what it says and that it will continue to try to introduce this unjust charge by the back door. If that is the case, not just our party but other parties which will speak here this evening, will make very clear through our actions both in this House and on the street that we will continue to campaign against such unjust charges until the prospect of them is buried once and for all.

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There is a contradiction at the heart of the Minister's response to the debate. On the one hand, he said that he has no intention of introducing a charge for so-called excessive use but when we gave him the opportunity to demonstrate that by deed and by removing the relevant provisions of the legislation, he refused to do so. Here is the genuine problem. Many people watching this debate will reach the conclusion that the Minister may not have an intention to introduce any form of water charges at this time but he wants to keep his options open and he wants to keep it on the Statute Book. That is the core of the problem. That is why people do not trust the Minister or his Government colleagues on this issue and that is why we have tabled this legislation. He also accused us of wasting time. I do not mind him dismissing us. I am quite used to being dismissed by Members on that side of the House. However, when he uses that language in this important debate, he is also dismissing whether intentionally or otherwise the tens of thousands of people out there who when they read that article in the Irish Independent were genuinely deeply concerned that "oh no, here we go again. The Government is at it". I am not accusing the Minister of dismissing those people but that is what people will hear when he chooses that language. He is right; there are some technical issues with our Bill. I make this point every time I introduce a Private Members' Bill. I do not have a team of civil servants. I do not have the luxury of expert drafting but those technical issues could be resolved by way of friendly amendments from the Government on Committee Stage without any problem and we would not object to that. The real issue is that the Minister does not want to remove this provision. I also thought it was very telling that the Minister introduced a new phrase into the debate. Both the Minister and the Minister of State, Deputy O’Donnell, talked about a water conservation charge. That is not what is in the legislation and, as he knows, that is not the language that was in the 2018 report of the committee on the future funding of water services. In fact, the very proposition of a charge for so-called excessive use was not even in the conservation chapter of that report. The whole debate about a charge was in the context of compliance with the water services directive. There was a view, which we disagreed with, that in order to comply with the directive there had to be some form of charge. It is very telling that nowhere in the very detailed chapter 5, with its recommendations, was there any talk of a charge. This is because the charge for so-called excessive use is not a conservation measure, given that there is no evidence from Irish Water or elsewhere that the 10% of households that have larger-than-average uses of water are wilfully wasting water. In fact, I suspect many of them are pensioners living in very old homes with old water systems who do not have the money to upgrade them or people who bought Celtic tiger-era defective homes with significant leakages. The Minister claimed that the Government had recommended the key recommendations of chapter 5 of the report. As somebody who drafted those and argued tooth and nail to get them into the report, I challenge him to say that is not the case. Let me correct the record. The Minister said on the one hand that there was the national leakage programme. That was in place before we made the report. We wanted that to be increased and accelerated. That has not happened. The Minister said the report called for the keeping of the first fix free scheme. That is not what the report says. We want it expanded to include the possibility of doing works within the curtilage of private property where the owners did not have the financial means to do so. He talked about awareness promoting through the funding of An Taisce. That programme has been in place since 2013. What we called for was in addition to existing programmes. The Minister also failed to mention some of the most important recommendations of chapter 5, those being, changes to planning, building control and greater supports for people who want to retrofit their own homes to have greater water conservation. Almost every one of the substantive recommendations of that report have been ignored by successive Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Governments. For the Minister to come here and read out a note from his officials to claim otherwise is unacceptable. I will turn to the big threats. The Minister is right that we have very significant threats but that does not diminish the importance of this issue in the context of a cost-of-living crisis where some of those threats could result in increased cost-of-living pressures. What are the real threats facing our economy and our society? Over the weekend, Davy stockbrokers complained that the impact of failed Government housing policy on our economic competitiveness was a bigger threat than Trump’s tariffs. I am not saying I agree with that but that is what it said. Today, myhome.ie and Bank of Ireland are saying the way in which this Government has pushed house prices to extraordinary highs means we have an additional layer of vulnerability if the tariffs introduced wrongly by Donald Trump have the impact many of us expect. One of the reasons we are all so concerned about those tariffs is that the way in which Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have managed the economy for decades has left us over-reliant on one economic sector in terms of growth and, particularly, tax revenue. We are more vulnerable to the impact of tariffs, and counter-tariffs if they are got wrong, than many of our competitors. We should debate those issues, but we should also debate this, too. The fact that the Government has taken a decision to oppose the Bill despite the fact that the Minister says it has no intention of introducing such a charge leaves the question open: what has it really got planned? That is why the people do not trust the Government. That is why we were right to table this Bill and the Government was wrong to oppose it.

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