Irish Water and a total loss of political faith

GOVERNMENT can only function if it has the trust of the governed. Yesterday, at more than 90 locations around the country and despite often appalling weather, some 130,000 people told our Government, in no uncertain terms, that it no longer has their trust.

This, let us not forget, is the Government that swept into power three years ago with an overwhelming mandate to do whatever was required to save our nation from economic ruin. Those who voted them in knew this would mean cuts and increased taxation; in return, we were promised a new, more honest and transparent way of doing government.

By and large, we have honoured our side of the bargain, meekly accepting pay and pension cuts, swingeing reductions in public services and a raft of new taxes, including the property tax. And yet, when the original deadline passed on Friday night, less than half the customer base had signed up with Irish Water.

Last month, anti-water charge candidates won two by-elections, ahead not just of the two Government parties but of both Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. Despite being rocked by its own scandals, Sinn Féin, the only mainstream party to oppose water charges, tops the latest opinion poll. Add in yesterday’s protests – the biggest such nationwide demonstration since the PAYE reform protests of the 1970s – and this Government has an open rebellion on its hands.

It is not, by and large, the principle of paying for domestic water to which otherwise law-abiding citizens object; nor, despite what Michael Noonan somewhat disingenuously tried to suggest yesterday, is this simply ‘the last issue’ over which there is any disagreement. It is the issue that sums up all our concerns about the manner in which this Government has reneged on its side of the bargain.

Even more outrageous, however, was Phil Hogan’s declaration that ‘we have to reform how we do business in this country or we will not learn from the past’. It is precisely because Irish Water has, from the word ‘go’, repeated all the worst mistakes of the past that more and more of us now feel there has been no real reform at Government level.

From the manner in which the original legislation was railroaded through the Oireachtas to the late rush to set billing rates (which are either wrong or misleading) to the unmistakable whiff of cronyism at board level to the decision to employ twice as many staff as are actually required – and to promise them obscenely generous bonuses – it has smacked of Fianna Fáil at its worst.

There has been a refusal to answer even the most basic of questions, such as the Irish Daily Mail’s queries this week about mystery board member Coleman Sheehy.

When taxes are dressed up as utilities – and that, in essence, is what Irish Water is all about – the Government should at the very minimum enforce strict standards of accountability, transparency and governance. The least we as householders should expect is that we should be paying not just for our water, but paying for it from a trusted source.

By its litany of spendthrift blunders, hopeless miscalculations, cynical obfuscations and panicked U-turns, Irish Water – and therefore, by extension, the Government – has lost that trust. It will not be lightly regained.