As with so many political issues in this country, the saga of Irish Water has just the slightest hint of modern interpretative dance about it. Everyone is poncing around the subject, striking exaggerated poses on the ideology of public ownership, the corporate bonus structure or the impact of metering on senior citizen health — and no, I’m not actually making the last one up.
None of these, of course, are the real issue. We had protests over planned water charges back in the day when Pat Rabbitte was a socialist, despite the fact that there was no metering , no new quango or any question of responsibility for the service being removed from county councils. People still protested, but why?
Simple. Us Irish don’t like paying tax and we definitely don’t like a tax that we are asked to effectively collect and pass on ourselves through a direct debit. We’ll exhaust ourselves protesting that we have no problem contributing more of our hard-earned cash in return for better services, but this is just not true. Not even a little bit.
Listen to any debate on the subject and it won’t take long before someone will hold forth on how we already pay for this vital service through existing general taxation. They will do so even though such a position is disingenuous in the extreme. If we were really paying for it already then we wouldn’t have the long list of urgent problems Irish Water has been established to fix. The fact is that we need a dedicated charge because there isn’t enought cash in the general taxation system to secure the future of the country’s water infrastructure. And that is that.
Even if the “Sure, we pay for it already” brigade are right — and they are clearly not — their argument is still nonsense, because it ignores the fact that if water charges work, we can use the rest of the amount raised through general taxation to fund other vital services — such as, you know, educating our children, caring for the sick and so on. In other words, we can pay more and get a better Ireland.
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At the political level, this is the argument that nobody wants to make. Take the Social Democrats, our latest political offering. This outfit, featuring the sitting independent TDs Stephen Donnelly, Catherine Murphy and Róisín Shortall, are almost proud to be in the “more tax please” category — until, that is, you ask them directly what increases they are promoting, by how much and what exactly we should expect in return. Insist on an answer and it’s back to routine guff on the focus being on social justice, treating the elderly with dignity and all the usual phrases you’d get from a political magic eight-ball.
Irish politicians have no problem presenting themselves as centrist or, at a push, centre-left, but there are very few willing to stand on the “we don’t like too much tax” centre-right.
This is quite strange, really, because if you scratch the surface that is probably what many Irish people think. By western standards, a large chunk, possibly a majority, of Irish voters believe that money in their back pockets beats Nordic solidarity every time they go into a polling booth. Yet, instead of admitting this and debating its merits in an open, transparent way, we do something that is unique to us. We latch onto any weakenesses in the system of whatever higher taxes are proposed and we use it to cover up the fact that, actually, we would prefer to keep the money and take our chances, thanking you.
Sure, we’ve no problem paying for water, but not until the creaking pipe infrastructure is repaired. Of course we’ll all contribute more, once childcare is free, GP visits are free, prescriptions are free, elderly care is free and we can all retire at 55. Sure, it’s the right thing to do. Cue hugs and all the Fintan O’Toole columns you can eat.
The Irish Water debacle, as we have come to call it, has been a wonderful source of political education for an incoming government. The lesson is this: whatever you do, you simply must hide any future tax rises needed to fund the promises that people elected you to deliver in the first place.
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Tinkering with what’s covered by VAT, massaging tax allowances, tweaking thresholds, or the old favourite of smashing and grabbbing pensions is the clever way to go. Everyone will end up paying far more than they would have were they to succumb to a straight water charge, but they won’t know that for certain unless they spend hours in a room with two accountants and an electron microscope.
Despite a repeated demand for more transparency in Ireland, the truth is that it just isn’t worthwhile for those in power. As a people, we have a a wonderful ability to ignore everything around the thing that really bothers us. We don’t allow ourselves to really see the actual leaking pipes, the contaminated water or the raw sewage being pumped into rivers. We don’t want to face up to the fact that the money needed to fix this has to come from somewhere because we just don’t want to pay for it ourselves.
So the future for Irish Water seems bleak to me. The various opposition parties, from Fianna Fail to the “alphabet left”, are taking the populist option and promising to do all sorts of mean things to the new utility.
Whichever conglomeration Fine Gael has to talk to post-election, you can bet that the hatcheting of Irish Water in its current form will be among the first items on the agenda. At best, it’ll be abolished. At worst, it’ll go into the political equivalent of a witness protection programme and eventually return under a new guise, just like the scandal-ridden FAS —sorry, Intreo. Didn’t you used to be Irish Water? Who, us? Oh no, you must be thinking of another giant government agency.
Fine Gael, I suspect, will have no problem conceding on the issue. They’ll be delighted to have an excuse to put the poor creature out of its misery. By 2026, there won’t be a single person in politics who will admit to having supported the policy.
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“Irish Water? Sure, I didn’t know what ‘dem other fellas were thinking at all.”