I refuse to feel guilty for watering plants. After all, I tried to pay for my water but they sent my money back!

SO WE’RE listening to the forecast yesterday, and it turns out that the heatwave we’ve been hoping for and talking about every summer for the past couple of decades is finally here. A Yellow Weather Warning for heat, with no sign of rain for at least a week, and temperatures in the mid to late 20s until the weekend, at least, so somebody says: ‘I know – let’s get a swimming pool! You can get one with a cover and a filter for about €50. Come on, let’s get one.’

But the grown-ups say: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. They take ages to fill, they get filthy really quickly, it’ll be full of leaves, you never remember to switch on the filter, and you’ll be bored with it in two hours.’ Reader, you know you’re getting old when you’re the one pleading for a pool and promising that, no, this time you really will keep it clean and you’ll use the filter and cover it every night, and your kids are saying forget it, and trying to distract you with free ice cream vouchers from the Irish Daily Mail.

I know they’re right, of course. These pools always look great in the advertisements, with entire families frolicking about, even if the dads always seem just the tiniest bit… creepy, sitting back like suburban Hugh Hefners, all tanned pecs and drinks in hand, in their blue plastic paddling pools. If you saw a neighbour in his togs splashing about in an overgrown basin with a bunch of kids you’d have the local constabulary on the blower pronto. And the ads never show the Speedo-ed dad sweating and cursing as he inflates the thing with his foot pump and fills it with a leaky hosepipe.

It can take up to 5,000 litres of water, a family-sized pool, and it’s only when you’ve inflated and filled it you realise that you’ve set it up in the part of the garden that only gets sunlight in the morning. And then you splash around, for a bit, and don’t bother putting on the cover because somebody might want to use it later and when you come out next morning it’s full of dead leaves and drowned insects and bird mess.

And, to be honest, the amount of water required to fill a back garden pool always made me think twice too. I remember the very hot and parched summers of the mid-70s – that’s how far back we’ve got to go, apparently, for a precedent for this run of hot weather – when the well on our farm ran dry. I remember the sound that the pump made when it gurgled vainly at the bottom of the empty well, while thirsty cows licked at their drained troughs. Then, every child in the house was summoned to help fill water barrels, twice a day, bucket by bucket from a nearby spring.

Like lots of farmers’ children, I have great respect for water, and have always thought badly of squandering it, no matter how plentiful the rain. And so, when I came home from a weekend away, on Sunday night, and found my ten-yearold bay trees shrivelled in their pots, I had a brief crisis of conscience about watering them. On the one hand, I know this dry weather will bring the inevitable water shortages and cautions against waste. Every out-of-the-ordinary weather event seems to play havoc with our water supplies: just a few months ago, following the heavy snow, Dublin’s network of ancient piping was leaking so much water that some areas had reduced supplies for weeks. If only there was some way of raising the money for investment in our water, so that nobody – not farmers, not gardeners, not city dwellers – ever had to think twice about enjoying the benefits of an abundant natural resource again…

Controversy

And that was the reason why I shelved my reservations and rolled out the hosepipe. Because I was happy to pay for my water. I wanted to pay for my water. I signed up with Irish Water, I set up a standing order to pay the charges, and I didn’t object when a team of men dug up my front cobbles to hunt down a leak as they installed my meter. I was one of the 60% majority who understood that water doesn’t actually just fall from the sky into my taps, that it has to be stored and cleaned and filtered and treated and then piped for miles to my home. And a poll, taken at the height of the water charges controversy, showed that this majority was on the increase – just before the charges were scrapped, some 80% of householders had expressed an intention to pay, a level of compliance on a par with, say, the TV licence collection.

But they scrapped them anyway. A profoundly cowardly government, in craven fear of the Pay4Nothing Parties, ignored the clear wish of a responsible majority and caved in on water. They gave in to the sort of thuggish behaviour that trapped our deputy prime minister and another woman in a car in Tallaght for two-and-a-half-hours, while protesters who claimed they couldn’t afford a fiver a week filmed the proceedings on €800 iPads. If the French, or German, or British deputy PMs had been trapped for five minutes by protesters, I suspect they’d have had all the water they wanted for free. From water cannons. Instead, no pun intended, our lot bottled it. If we face water shortages over the next week or so, you probably won’t hear a peep out of the Pay4Nothing parties. They’re too busy these days, anyway, battling the rising tide of employment as we approach the point where there will be jobs for everyone who wants to work and immigrant labour will be required to keep industry ticking over. They certainly won’t want to remind us of how their ‘victory’ over political spinelessness has precluded any investment in the water service. They won’t want you remembering their role in ensuring a country with plentiful rainfall still manages to run short of water after a brief spell of sunshine. They won’t want you blaming them when your water is cut off from 7pm each night.

Because that’s the problem with these Pay4Nothing parties – they’re great for telling us what services shouldn’t be paid for, what charges shouldn’t be levied, what benefits shouldn’t be cut. They’re not so hot, though, when it comes to solutions. Water, they suggested vaguely, should be paid for out of ‘central taxation’. By the people who already pay for everything, then, with all the money left over from running a world-class health service, as well as funding education, security, infrastructure, social housing and the rest of it.

Most people, even in hard-pressed communities, get that services have to be funded. If some shameless political opportunists hadn’t seen a chance to make a name for themselves by exploiting the Government’s undoubted bungling on water, the charges would have been introduced without incident, as were property charges. If this Government had handled the water issue correctly from the outset, rather than enriching consultants and promoting political lackeys to prime posts, we might now have a system that was fit for purpose.

So, no, I’m not going to feel bad about watering my garden, or even filling a paddling pool if I fancy it. I tried to pay for my water and, for my troubles, was treated like an idiot who’d sent a cheque to an exiled Nigerian Prince or a Spanish lottery agent. My Government boasted of the efforts it made to get me my money back. I didn’t ask for my money back, and I didn’t want it. I wanted to pay for a reliable water supply, one that could withstand our modest extremes of weather without need of ‘boil water’ notices and shortages. So if the current heatwave causes water problems, don’t point the finger at the neighbour you see using a hose or filling a kids’ pool. We all know exactly where the blame lies.