The Government and the Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, had their very best Malcolm Tuckers working on their presentation of the new water charges regime. Their master plan was to decide to appeal to "reasonable" people, and I guess the logic emanates from the feeling of who would not think of themselves as reasonable. I am accused of being a kidnapper by the Taoiseach, a ringleader by the Tánaiste and akin to ISIS by Deputy Coonan of Fine Gael, and even I consider myself a reasonable person. It was good thinking to appeal to the reasonable section of society.
A reasonable person is somebody of sound judgment, so what will they make of the plan? A reasonable person will notice that all the talk of conservation is now gone for four years and there is now a flat-rate, regressive home tax, where a multimillionaire household will pay exactly the same as a household with one or two unemployed people. The bottom 10% of our society in terms of income, with disposable income of €8,500, will spend almost 2% on water charges, whereas the top 10% will spend just 0.1% of its disposable income. A reasonable person will notice that this is a purely temporary measure, after which an average family will pay more in water charges than they would have under the old regime. With the withdrawal of the 30,000-litre household allowance, the annual cost for one year for a single-adult household will be €200 from 2019, whereas under the old regime, it would have been €117, based on usage of 148 litres per person per day. Those are the figures for the Dublin region from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. For a two-adult family, it will be €400, as opposed to the €380 it would have been under previous arrangements.
A reasonable person will see we have an empty promise about legislation. The Government is promising legislation to provide for a plebiscite before any privatisation, but such legislation could be repealed by a future Dáil, or the plebiscite could simply be ignored by a future Government. Every reasonable person, using sound judgment, would surely think about where he or she has heard these sorts of arguments and promises before and it will remind people of bin charges. Exactly the same comments were made but the waivers went, prices increased and bin services were disastrously privatised at the expense of workers - such as those at Greyhound - and consumers. The reasonable people who do not want water charges that people simply cannot afford - or privatisation - will know that we must stop water charges now and end Irish Water. We must stop the commodification of our water, regardless of price. Once this basic human need and right is commodified, the price will increase and the company will be privatised.
Those reasonable people need to join the We Won't Pay demonstration on 29 December and the massive Right2Water protest on 10 December while, above all, preparing, arguing and organising for a massive boycott that will sink these charges as the poll tax was sunk in Britain, when it simultaneously sank Margaret Thatcher. It will be similar to how water charges were sunk here in the 1990s.
Currently, the airwaves are filled with the Government all of a sudden recognising a chronic under-investment in water infrastructure, as is reflected in many aspects of our infrastructure as a society. This Government and Fianna Fáil share responsibility for that as they have been in power over the last decades and chose not to invest while instead doing other things, like bailing out bondholders and offering an almost tax-free existence for the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and the rest. The magic answer is the phrase "off-balance sheet". The Government is trying to blind people with science by using the phrase, arguing that there is somehow free money coming about because something is off-balance sheet. There is no free money, as this will be a publicly owned company until it is privatised. Any loan taken out must be paid for by us through water charges. There is no extra free money coming about because something is placed off-balance sheet. It is an accounting trick.
We can examine the elements of the market corporation test, which indicates that sellers must act to maximise their profits in the long term. In order to pass the market corporation test, which the Government is committed to, Irish Water must be a profit-maximising entity. That means there will be attempts to raise prices and do whatever is possible to raise more money from people.
I will refer to the protest in Jobstown on Saturday, which has been the subject of such overblown attacks in the Chamber today and right across the media. We should remember that those attacks did not start on Saturday in Jobstown.
They started two weeks previously with talk of a sinister fringe and dissident elements interfering with protests. This is the stick that goes with the baby carrot announced by the Minister, Deputy Kelly, yesterday. It is a conscious tactic to demonise protesters and frighten people away from the protest on 10 December and involvement in the campaign against water charges.
The protest on Saturday was organised by local residents, overwhelmingly women. Contrary to untruths told in this Chamber, graduates of An Cosán were not jeered but were cheered and applauded by protesters. There was a peaceful protest by hundreds of people, a sit-down protest and a slow march to express anger. The media has disgracefully attempted to denigrate the protesters and the people of Jobstown and Tallaght. Independent Newspapers is leading this denigration, and this is no accident, because Denis O'Brien has a commercial interest in denigrating protests against water meters that he is imposing. Similarly, it was no accident that Shell to Sea protesters were denigrated by Independent Newspapers when it was controlled by Tony O'Reilly, and it was no accident when the workers of 1913 were denigrated by Independent Newspapers, then controlled by William Martin Murphy. This is what the media does and this is what the establishment does.
All the Deputies from the establishment parties claim to be in favour of the right to protest and suddenly say they have participated in many protests. They say they support peaceful protest, but every time a movement threatens the rule of the establishment the protests are denigrated and demonised. People are angry and they have every right to be so. This is about more than water charges - it is about cuts to child benefit, cuts to rent allowance and the destruction of people's lives over the past six years. Above all, this is about the mass of people becoming involved in politics, and that concerns the establishment. The word "mob" is used to discourage people from engaging with politics outside election time. The Labour Party wants people to be voting fodder that will sit back and allow the party to break its promises. Things have changed and that is why the Government is scared.
I will finish with a short quote from James Connolly:
But at last, with the development of manufacturing, came the gathering together of the mob, and consequent knowledge of its numbers and power, and with the gathering together also came the possibility of acquiring education. Then the mob started upon its upward march to power - a power only to be realised in the Socialist Republic. In the course of that upward march the mob has transformed and humanised the world. It has abolished religious persecution and imposed toleration upon the bigots of all creeds; it has established the value of human life, softened the horrors of war as a preliminary to abolishing it, compelled trial by jury, abolished the death penalty for all offences save one, and in some countries abolished it for all...
Connolly concludes by saying "All hail, then, to the mob, the incarnation of progress!"
