Water, not the recession, to sink the Ship of State

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Only once or twice in my life have I ever taken part in a protest march but last backend, I was sorely tempted to join the anti-water charges protest in Galway.

Funnily enough, I don’t really have any strong objection to paying a reasonable charge for a supply of water, and like most farmers that’s already the case, and quite a stiff bill it can be too.

However, with such a botch made of the original plan and with no one having a clue as to what amount of money they would be paying, the anger of the people – ordinary Joe Soaps – was quite palpable.

After going through a solid five to six years of austerity, it really was the last straw when a water charges regime was foisted upon us, with no clarity whatsoever as to what we might pay.

Now on top of everything else we had endured, it seemed that we would be entering a permanent household regime whereby we would end up having to count the number of showers family members had, during the course of the week, in case the bill went through the roof. All quite ironic for those who remember the days when running water in houses was considered a luxury.

If at the start, the Government had presented the set of proposals on water charges that they eventually prescribed to us, probably there would have been very little by way of a hullabaloo. In the end the final package that emerged was quite precise, with a defined cap on the price of water for a set number of years.

The damage of course has been done by then and it seems likely that the current Government won’t be forgiven too quickly for ‘coming the heavy’ on ordinary people and Phil Hogan’s less than subtle ‘down your throat’ approach on the punishments to be administered on all of us, really got under everyone’s skin.

And yet, I find something vaguely disturbing about some of the more recent protest actions, where the movement seems to be driven by activists and professional demonstrators, who show little regard for the rights of people to go about their business and to do their normal day’s work.

There is probably out there a cohort of people who, to use a country expression, ‘will pay for nothing’ and who see the water charges issue as one that will drag on for months and maybe years to come.

The workmen installing water meters are simply just doing their job; the Gardaí who are called to keep the peace are also doing what they are paid to do; the politicians, bad and all as they might be, do not deserve to be imprisoned in their cars.

A level of nastiness has now crept into the whole water protest issue and the ordinary citizens – whose marches and protests – were critical in jolting the Government back into the world of real people, probably do not want to be associated with some of the more extreme actions we’re seeing on the streets, especially in Dublin.