Yesterday, Irish Water was forced to admit that fewer than half of householders were paying the Government's water tax. The Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Kelly, the Tánaiste's deputy leader,-----

Who wants to be leader.

-----has insisted that the €30.5 million collected to date of a projected income of €66.8 million was "a good start". I do not know what planet the Minister is living on, but his delusional response to the overwhelming rejection of water charges further discredits the Government. We learned today that, with the failure of the Government's intimidation and threats, Irish Water has proposed a campaign of direct harassment of struggling families. It proposes to bombard thousands of households-----

Sinn Féin would know about that.

-----by telephone in a desperate, last ditch attempt-----

-----to get them to sign up to water charges. This move is pathetic.

I raised with the Taoiseach yesterday all of these issues. How does Irish Water expect to attract investment with such a derisory level of compliance with the Government's charge? According to one economist, at least 80% of householders would need to pay if the company were to borrow at competitive rates. That is not going to happen. The Government's water tax has been roundly and comprehensively rejected. The Tánaiste has heard what people are saying. Now, it is time to act. Abolish the charges. Abolish Irish Water.

This morning in Dublin Castle, the Tánaiste claimed, mar dhea, that she wanted to listen to people's views regarding the direction of economic policy. I do not know if that was some sort of joke, but if it was, no one is laughing. Clearly, she has no intention of listening to anyone outside the Government about its discredited and shambolic water policy. The people have spoken loudly, repeatedly and clearly. They have flatly rejected its water tax.

Did Deputy McDonald pay?

The Government's figures for the Irish Water quango do not add up. It is time that she face this reality. The water tax is finished. Will the Tánaiste and the Labour Party heed this message?

When I spoke this morning in Dublin Castle to a very wide group of people from the trade union movement, from the business movement and from the voluntary and advocacy organisations in Ireland, big and small, I talked about a future that we would all put together for Ireland that would give us a good outlook for people who were older and retired, for younger people and for families with children.

The feedback was very strong and it is a vision people in Ireland wanted, with everyone back at work-----

On slave wages.

-----the country investing in schools and hospitals and a water system that produces safe clean water. I cannot understand why Sinn Féin's policy is to bankrupt Irish Water and to potentially seek to bankrupt the Irish State, as it advocated some six or seven years ago when it wanted this country to default and do what some countries have, unfortunately, experienced in recent times. If we are to fulfil the vision of this morning in Dublin Castle, of getting our people back to work and building infrastructure, clean water is critical to that. Whether Sinn Féin likes it or not we have taken the water supply away from over 30 councils-----

To privatise it.

-----who all dealt with it in a different way and we have brought it together into a national utility, like the ESB or Bord Gáis, identifying leaks and lead pipes, issues which county councils around the country had sat on for years and not addressed. We have already begun to bring to an end to the scandal of boil water notices in County Roscommon, which is an enormous achievement that was not achievable by a local authority on its own.

If the Government had given €500 million to local authorities they would have done it.

We want to build a tourism industry, to attract foreign direct investment and build local Irish businesses. Above all, we want our farmers and our agriculture industry to prosper and we need good clean water for all those things, as well as for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren. Sinn Féin's vision is to pretend that instead of a functioning utility, we can load €800 million onto income tax and taxes on workers this year.

The Government is both subsidising and charging and it is still not fixing the leaks.

What we are proposing in the budget is to give workers tax relief, particularly in terms of the USC, and to have a separate system for paying for water at a very moderate rate of €60 net for a single person household and €160 for two adults or more. This has been an extremely difficult debate and I acknowledge that there are people vehemently opposed to the development of Irish Water but there are many people who have paid the charges. I congratulate the hundreds of thousands of families, individuals and households who have done so.

The Government bullied them into paying.

The Government intimidated them.

The billing cycle started relatively recently and I am very confident that people will pay for clean, reliable drinking water that serves their needs from industry to hospital to private home.

I am struck by the extent to which the Tánaiste has morphed into a Fine Gael mouthpiece. There is not a sliver of difference between her answer-----

At least I am not the mouthpiece of Deputy Adams.

The Tánaiste is admitting, then, that she is the mouthpiece of Fine Gael.

The Labour Party, led by the Tánaiste, which came to office on a platform of opposition to water charges for some very obvious reasons, not least that people had suffered so much by way of cutbacks and were struggling to get by, now staunchly defends the indefensible. The Labour Party and the Tánaiste stand shoulder to shoulder with the Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny and tells people they really do not care what their view is, what their struggles are or what their difficulties are - they are going to stick with this unfair charge in any event. The financing model for this utility is now utterly undermined but the Tánaiste is in cloud cuckoo land on that score as well.

The subvention for Irish Water on the State balance sheet in 2015 is €810 million. Fewer than 50% of households have paid up and if the Tánaiste thinks that is going to improve she is wrong as it is not going to happen. Many people will not pay as a matter of principle, as they pay already and oppose moves towards privatisation, but a huge number of people simply cannot pay. This is not about whether or not Sinn Féin likes it, as the Tánaiste would have it. This opposition is beyond any political party or anything we have seen in recent times in this State.

Sinn Féin is like Syriza.

New Democracy is the Fine Gael crowd in Greece.

The Tánaiste should listen to the people as she has promised to do and scrap this scheme. It is not working for the people or for the State's balance sheet. Would the Tánaiste prefer to blindly follow where Deputy Enda Kenny and his Blueshirt colleagues lead her, and insist on a policy that is clearly failing? She disregards lone parents, pickpockets them and leaves them struggling. She then delivers a homily in which she says it is only €3 per week but that does not add up for people who have to run their households. She is persisting with this even though she knows the damage it will do to individuals and families.

In the forthcoming budget the Government will have room for spending of between €1.2 billion and €1.5 billion. Given where the country has come from, the improvements in both last year's and next year's budget offer us an opportunity to assist everybody in this country.

Did the Government assist lone parents?

More important, it will help us get more people back to work because the key to economic recovery is to get people back to work, either in jobs or in self-employment. There are some 4,000 involved in working directly or indirectly in the area of water services. Sinn Féin's proposal for water services is to throw those people out of a job and to bankrupt the provision of proper water services in this country.

Rubbish. This is Alice in Wonderland economics.

In the forthcoming budget the important thing is to see a shift in favour of people at work or in self-employment with low or middle incomes and to use that for the economic growth that everybody in this country has worked so hard to create. The people have worked so hard to get the country out of the economic difficulties they have borne. We want a recovery dividend and an easing in income taxes on labour so that people, especially families with children, can work and have a lower burden.

We also want a well-structured service sector that provides for absolute essentials. I note that Deputy McDonald did not disagree with me that a good quality water service is essential in a modern economy, as is a good quality sewerage service. Deputy McDonald did not say this could be provided for nothing or magicked out of thin air.

We have a strategy in the Labour Party.

I am suggesting that the Government should stop screwing struggling families. That is my proposition to the Tánaiste.

We have a strategy in the forthcoming budget to put money back in the pockets of workers while building quality services.

What about parents who work less than 19 hours?

Sinn Féin does not even seem to have an economic policy.

It does not have a water policy and it does not have a policy which will put money in workers' pockets and help them go back to work.

The only policies the Tánaiste has are Fine Gael policies.

What does Sinn Féin want? It seems only to care about soundbites.

The Government certainly is no friend of the Greeks. It never even tried to help them.

Sinn Féin has nothing of substance to say in this debate or any other debate.

The Fine Gael Deputies are smiling over there. Their policies were implemented. It is only the Fine Gaelers who are smiling.

It is summertime.

Order for Deputy Michael Fitzmaurice, please.