Abolishing Irish Water would be an enormous mistake, and here’s why...

One of the main slogans chanted by protesters all over the country this week, and gleefully spread throughout social media in their aftermath, is: ‘You can shove your water meters up your a***!’

It’s not exactly up there with Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’, is it? Crude and crass, it sums up one aspect of the water charge protest: the side that has thrown reason out the window. Worse are the vandalism and attacks on Irish Water staff and gardaí that are starting to get out of hand. Abused, threatened and assaulted (three times every day), gardaí have called on anti-water charge campaigners to condemn the wave of violence.

Given the litany of errors made by Irish Water, it’s understandable that people get riled – but there is no excuse for violence.

The majority of protesters do demonstrate peacefully and this is a form of democracy. If enough people get out on the streets, the Government should respond accordingly.

And it is bending over backwards as fast as it can. But it has made such a mess of explaining the issues that even if it gave away so many water subsidies that people made a profit, they still won’t be happy. Only the demise of ‘the enemy’, Irish Water, seems acceptable to many.

But what would happen then? We’ve lost sight of this and many other questions in a row that’s got as murky as a glass of Roscommon tapwater. Here are some of the answers: Why should we pay for something that falls from the sky?

It doesn’t fall from the sky into our taps. It costs €1.2bn a year to harvest, treat and deliver. And if we don’t pay for something, we will waste it. That’s human nature. (One family I know runs the shower at night to soothe a crying infant.) Without charges, we all might do the same.

Bin charges were hugely controversial when they came in. But without them, how many people would bother recycling? Is Irish Water being lined up for privatisation?

It was set up in a way that suggests this is not on the cards. The articles of association make it ‘very clear that they don’t want to see the ownership change’, a company law expert said. (Such is the controversy on this issue that he didn’t want to be named.) Are Irish Water staff paid too much? And why should they get bonuses they don’t deserve?

Indeed. And 4,000 council workers are apparently being paid by Irish Water for doing little or nothing. But State workers’ pay is also a wider issue. Irish Water staff were largely recruited from local authorities and could hardly be expected to work for less. They are paid in line with public sector workers, who do get paid, on average, a lot more than the rest of us and get bonuses or increments whether they deserve them or not. Was Irish Water ever a good idea?

We had 34 local authorities with little money trying to look after increasingly broken-down water infrastructure. That’s why the aforementioned Roscommon tap water is undrinkable. A single company looking after all the country’s water should have the resources to sort that out, whereas one small local authority would not. Are water charges set to increase in the years ahead?

It seems that was the plan; the numbers don’t add up otherwise. Up to €5bn is the estimated bill to fix our water infrastructure. How else is Irish Water going to get this and repay borrowings unless it gets more in charges, or State subsidies? Given the political upheaval, I reckon that instead of more water charges in the years ahead, there will be fewer tax cuts. What happens if people follow Gerry Adams’s example and don’t pay their water charges?

If people don’t pay and the attacks and vandalism get worse (such as pouring cement on meters), Irish Water could go bust. The Government would have to bail it out and we would lose out big time. There would be no investment in water supply and more counties than Roscommon will have undrinkable tap water.