The cowardly dropping of water charges has left us all high and dry

AFTER dropping a friend to the airport early on Sunday morning, with the sun already high in a totally cloudless sky, we took a detour to Malahide Beach for a swim.

By 9.30am, the car park serving the long sandy strand was almost full. So here’s a fabulous beach which can comfortably accommodate thousands of people, served by a single car park that can only accommodate a few dozen cars. By the time we left, at around 11.30, there was a queue to get in, and two overheated, stressed-out drivers, both with carloads of kids, almost came to blows over our vacated space.

And the story seems to have been the same right across the country over the hot weekend: packed car parks and chaotic scenes on public roads, with cars effectively abandoned wherever their drivers could find a space as they flocked to the beaches. Delays of up to two hours were reported by people trying to exit Bull Island on Sunday evening, and roads around Killiney were clogged with parked cars.

Meanwhile, just as inevitable as the traffic turmoil, the fine weather also brought the usual water warnings. Not even a week into this heatwave, and we’re being warned to limit our water usage, with some areas being threatened with reduced pressure and outages if people so much as think about watering their plants or filling a kiddies’ pool.

Cowardice

In a country where it rains an average of 255 days a year, we are unable to store sufficient water to get us through a rare dry spell. In a country where nobody is more than a couple of hours drive from a world-class beach, a country studded with literally thousands of lakes and countless miles of sparkling rivers, we are unable to provide facilities to allow people to enjoy a stressfree swim on a sunny day. So you can’t access a beach and you can’t fill a paddling pool in your own back garden: sometimes you’d have to conclude it’s a mercy that we rarely get the summers we wish for, after all.

Of all the acts of political cowardice this country has seen over the past half a century, the abandonment of the water charges scheme has to be the biggest capitulation to the smallest protest cohort in our history. By the time the water charges were finally abandoned, in 2016, some 60% of households had signed up and paid them, and 80% had indicated to pollsters that they were willing to do so.

In the same year, we had one of the highest levels of TV licence evasion in Europe, with around 14% of householders refusing to buy a licence. Yet there was no question of scrapping the TV licence to appease those refuseniks. But then, the water protesters had already been indulged to a degree that would never have been tolerated in any other European state. Remember how a shower of bellowing thugs were allowed to keep the country’s deputy prime minister, then-tánaiste Joan Burton, trapped in her car for two-and-ahalf hours while gardaí just looked on, fearful of further provoking them by simply restoring order?

Like the vast majority of householders, I had paid my water charges, and resented being refunded my money as if I was a lame-brained dupe who had sent my bank details to some exiled Nigerian prince. I believed I should pay for the privilege of flushing my toilets with drinking water of a quality that most of our continental neighbours have to buy by the litre.

The cost to most families, as Enda Kenny pointed out at the time, was going to be little more than the price of a couple of pints of stout a week.

Pressure

Look, I’m not naïve enough to believe that all the revenue generated by the charges would have been ring-fenced for the sole purpose of improving our water system. As we’d already discovered – and this was one of the more legitimate reasons for public resistance to the new charges – millions were being squandered on consultants’ fees and executives’ salaries. But once the public saw their charges leaking directly into the fat cats’ pockets, the political pressure to address these abuses would have been intense.

And, aside from the revenue generated, water charges would have made us all more careful about our usage, so that these shortages would be less likely after a brief dry spell.

Most of all, paying water charges would have given us the leverage of withholding our payments if mismanagement or incompetence saw these shortages continue. Instead, like the poor souls baking for hours in cars waiting to find a parking space at a beach, we have no choice but to suck it up.