The former Minister responsible for water bills has said the public either charge for water or face massive fines from Europe.

Labour’s Alan Kelly has been responding to reports that Ireland may face repercussions if we stop paying for water.

The European Commission has said we will not be given any flexibility on the issue.

Alan Kelly was the Minister for the Environment in the last Government and he thinks there is no way around water charges.

“Somebody just needs to call a spade, a spade,” said Kelly.

“It’s either we have water charges, affordable water charges, or we’ll have massive fines. We signed up to European regulations, we signed up under various different treaties to European law.

“You can’t just cherry pick, especially seeing as in 2010 we already made this decision.

“You can’t just say we like some laws, we’ll take them and we don’t like other laws and we won’t take them.”