A watery grave awaits for all our hard earned lucre

Country Living with Frances Farragher

It’s been a while since I’ve witnessed such a hullabaloo from normally quietly spoken people in ‘the local’. The subject was the water charges, and like a lot of other things, it’s not a topic that has much sign of going away. At a time when there was just about to be a fairly good reaction to Budget ‘15, the blood pressure about the water charges is rising rapidly with the first bills due to arrive in letter boxes by early January.

Back in the days of World War II, there was a phrase about the American soldiers stationed in Britain of being ‘oversexed, over-paid and over here’ and it’s the kind of line that could be applied to the monster that is now Irish Water. Whatever about the first couple of words on the American GIs, Irish Water very definitely are over-paid and they most certainly are over here.

After taking a whacking from the last six or seven budgets, and at a time when there’s a mention of good times returning, the water charges are landed on our doorstep: another new tax, that once introduced, will never again disappear from our payments list.

If people felt that they were getting genuine value for money and if something had been done to repair a system where over 40% of water produced leaks away into the ground, then there might have been some modicum of support for the charges. Instead we seem destined to keep feeding a money devouring monster where fat bonuses are already part of the culture.

We do all know full well water is an absolutely precious commodity that here in Ireland gives us our lush countryside. Every year without fail, we receive about 40 to 50 inches of rain from our skies, but when it comes to storing the stuff and putting it through a pipe network, we have been pretty awful at it.

The real problem with this water charges business is that every worker and taxpayer throughout the length and breadth of Ireland believes, with some justification, that the taxes and various levies/charges imposed upon them since they received their first pay-packet, should have included the cost of water provision. And maybe ‘so be it’, if they had to cough up a bit more in ‘normal’ tax to cover that.

Whatever chance Irish Water might have had of winning over the public, and it probably was pretty slim from the start, it has dissipated completely over recent months with a disastrous PR and information arrangement. Members of the public with queries have been left waiting and waiting on the phones while the simplest of press queries, that in fairness the local councils would have answered within a matter of minutes, take days, and sometimes weeks, to elicit the most basic of information. Even at that, when the reply comes, it is invariably short on detail and devoid of any semblance of ‘on the ground’ knowledge.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.