Four hundred new jobs will be announced later at a call centre for Irish Water.

The new company is to install meters at hundreds of thousands of homes across the country, ahead of new charges to be introduced in 2015.

Irish Water expects the metering process to be completed within three years.

The new staff will be hired by Abtran, which recently operated the Local Property Tax helpline on behalf of Revenue.

The first hundred workers will be hired in July, with three hundred more to be taken in the months ahead.

Their job will be to provide customer support, as an army of installers put meters on over a million properties, at a rate of 27 thousand a month.

Irish Water expects the metering process to be complete within three years - the Government has already said the first bills
won't arrive until January 2015 at the earliest.