Head of Irish Water rules out court actions over non-payment

Irish Water managing director John Tierney has said that he does not envisage "a situation where we would be forced to take people to court" over non-payment of water charges.

Over the course of a pre-recorded interview with RTÉ yesterday, he denied that the processes involved in forcing people who were refusing to pay the charges were cumbersome or inoperable and expressed confidence that measures including the applying of charges to the properties of owner-occupiers, would be sufficient to guarantee compliance rates in excess of 90 per cent.

He suggested that the reworked charge of €260 for a two-adult household and €160 for a single-adult household, not including a water conservation grant of €100, was “very affordable by any measure” and claimed that a simplification of the water charge regime would encourage more people to register.

He also said the utility would "work with people" who could not pay their bills and pointed to a number of so-called easy-pay measures announced by the Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly yesterday.

Irish Water turned down repeated requests from The Irish Times for an interview with Mr Tierney yesterday, with a spokeswoman claiming he was too busy to talk to this newspaper as he had to “get on with the running of Irish Water”.

The utility’s managing director has appeared reticent in recent weeks to personally address mounting public concerns about the company and his stewardship of it.

Mr Tierney has declined most interview requests since the beginning of the year, when he admitted on Seán O’Rourke’s RTÉ radio show that Irish Water had spent in excess of €50 million on consultants before it was up and running.

During yesterday's RTÉ interview, he said that the destruction of the data base of hundreds of thousands of PPS numbers which the utility has already collected was "a big job of work" and said consultations were ongoing with the Data Protection Commission about how the sensitive information could be securely destroyed.