“We’ve won some battles, but the war is far from over.” That was the message Deputy Mick Wallace delivered to a meeting in The Bailey in Enniscorthy on Saturday night.

The Independent TD and his Dáil colleague Clare Daly were in town ahead of a mass protest due to take place in Merrion Square in Dublin on Wednesday.

Encouraging people to travel to Dublin on Wednesday the Independent TDs said this issue was “ours to lose rather than theirs to win.”

Wallace told the meeting the second stage of the Water Services Bill was a powerful exercise in spin that refused to discuss anything remotely unpleasant such as how councils will deal with local authority tenants if they can not afford to pay water charges.

“To be honest I didn’t expect the Government to do so much back-peddling and the effect of that is they now have less credibility than they had,” Deputy Wallace said.

“They now say they want to make water charges affordable, but a month ago they didn’t care if these charges were affordable or not. They say these water charges are all about conservation, but Irish Water has yet to fix one leak and the fact that everyone pays a flat fee means there’s no incentive to conserve water. This Government are flip flopping and I’ll make a prediction: if Fine Gael and Labour get back in to Government, they’ll move the goalposts in order to charge more for water and ultimately privatise Irish Water.”