IN Leinster House last Wednesday, political correspondents openly discussed the option of cancelling their Irish Water direct debits after the agriculture minister Simon Coveney suggested on RTE’s Prime Time that the abolition of charges was open to negotiation in the formation of a government.
In the Law Library, barristers were having the same private conversations. The deadline for payment of Irish Water’s third-round bills is this Tuesday.
Anecdotal evidence suggests many of the 928,000 householders who paid the first two are thinking twice about paying any more. A boycott of the charges, which began as a grassroots movement of civil disobedience, was turning mainstream.
Just two months ago, in an interview with The Irish Times, the environment minister Alan Kelly declared that water charges had “gone off” the agenda and the issue was taking up only “3%-5%” of his time. The general election has proved him wrong. At least 86 of the 158 TDs in the new Dail are opposed to Irish Water’s charges.
Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Fein’s deputy leader, said the election result “signals the death knell on domestic water charges”. Barry Cowen, Fianna Fail’s environment spokesman, said scrapping of charges was a red-line issue for entering government, though he was later contradicted by his party leader, Micheál Martin.
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Coveney apologised for his “loose words” on TV to Fine Gael’s parliamentary party, but the genie was out of the bottle. Yesterday, party sources were quoted as saying the issue was on the table for talks.
Irish Water warned that abolition would cost €7.012bn. The utility company also said: “We can’t abolish domestic water charges anyway under the EU Water Framework Directive, which requires member states to implement the ‘polluter pays’ principle for those who use water.”
Anti-charges campaigners dispute Irish Water’s figures, but there is no consensus among them about whether households that have paid should be reimbursed. Clare Daly, an independent TD, says no. Anti Austerity Alliance -People Before Profit (AAA-PBP) says yes. Fianna Fail has floated a tax-credit compromise.
There is one point on which everybody agrees: water charges are back at the top of the political agenda.
“The discussion in supermarkets shifted from ‘it’s a nice day’ to talk of the protests and austerity
THIS is the second time the issue has caught the body politic by surprise. The first time was on October 11, 2014, when tens of thousands of protesters joined a national anti-charges march in Dublin. Politicians were not the only ones to underestimate the protest vote. So did the media. The issue was not even raised in any of the three televised leaders’ debates in the election campaign.
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Brendan Ogle, an official with the Unite trade union and a co-ordinator of Right2Water, said: “The advisers to the political parties were listening to the media and reading newspapers and believing the issue had gone away. They were, in effect, believing their own propaganda.”
The reason that passivity vanished on the first of Right2Water’s three demonstrations, in late 2014, was a combination of public anger and left-wing strategy.
Some of that anger was inflamed by the revelation that €86m of Irish Water’s €180m set-up costs was spent on consultants, contractors and legal advice. The charges themselves, and claims that the utility was designed to be privatised, proved to be the final straw.
“What was planned to be a one-mile long march turned into four miles,” said Ogle of October 2014. “We knew then the water issue had connected with people and we thought, ‘There’s potential here.’”
On the same day, Paul Murphy of the Socialist party pipped Sinn Fein to win a Dail seat in a by-election in Dublin South-West. His win was attributed to the AAA’s clear stance on boycotting water charges.
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“A lot of people didn’t see the politicisation of working-class communities,” said Murphy, one of six AAA—PBP TDs in the new Dail. “We have been significant beneficiaries of that. When we won the 2014 by-election, we had about 40 AAA members in Dublin South-West. Now we have 140. In the general election we won in areas such as Killinarden and Jobstown, where Sinn Fein would have always done well. Our roots are much deeper and our membership has increased.”
Murphy says the water charges energised people demoralised by austerity measures. “When the bills started coming out, we had 25 street meetings in Dublin South-West in two weeks. Every night we were giving people information and they became advocates for the boycott.”
Murphy is on bail charged with the false imprisonment of the tanaiste Joan Burton at an anti-charges protest in November 2014. Lawyers for Murphy and 18 co-accused plan to apply to the Dublin Circuit Court tomorrow for a trial date to be set.
A survey by Rory Hearne, a senior policy analyst with left-wing think tank Tasc, who is contesting the Seanad elections, found that 77.6% of protesters believed the most effective way of winning change was by protesting and 52.3% cited local activities. Of the anti-charges protesters surveyed, 83.1% said they intended to vote for “left candidates”.
Murphy said the movement grew out of “hard-pressed council estates”, but Ogle disagrees. “The people who are saying this is class politics need to go to the marches. What they will find is tens of thousands of people, young and old, male and female, employed and unemployed, cross-class. Our purpose from day one was to make sure the campaign was broad; that it involved everyone but belonged to no one.”
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The boycott was a core difference in strategy between Right2Water and the AAA. The former said supporters could decide themselves, while the latter promoted it. Murphy says that the visibility of anti-meter protests in communities “gave [boycotters] confidence that they were not alone when they were in their own homes looking at the Irish Water bill on the table”.
Bernie Hughes, 58, a community development worker from Finglas in Dublin, was one of four protesters jailed last year for breaching a court order obtained by GMC Sierra, a Siteserv subsidiary, prohibiting them from coming within 20 metres of installation works. Hughes and the other three were freed on March 9, 2015 when their detention was deemed unlawful.
“The other prisoners and the prison staff were supportive,” said Hughes, who also served jail time for a bin-charges protest in 2003. “I’ve seen young people getting politicised with the water. The discussion in the supermarkets shifted from ‘it’s a nice day’ to talk of the protests and austerity. That’s the yardstick I use.”
Hughes fought the election as an independent in Dublin North-West, receiving 1,120 first-preference votes (3.03%) in the constituency, where Labour TD John Lyons lost his seat. She was among 106 candidates, including Sinn Fein’s, who signed up to principles drawn up by Right2Change, an offshoot of Right2Water.
In Cobh, Co Cork, Karen Doyle, 44, recognised the issue would be a game-changer for Irish politics. “When Irish Water came into our town we held a meeting and the room was too small for the amount of people who turned up,” said the part-time pharmacy assistant. “Within a week, we had organised the town so that 42 estates and streets came out and stopped the meters going in.”
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Doyle was among dozens of activists given training in political-economy debate by the trade unions in Right2Water. She says Irish water charge protesters “could be the leaders of a global movement”.
SOURCES in Irish Water insist that large numbers of customers did not cancel payments last week. One source said there was immense frustration over Fianna Fail’s stance and the statement by Coveney.
“A lot of customers are annoyed that suddenly they are being mocked, or advised to hold off on paying,” he said. “Thankfully the big two parties seem to be backing off, as they realise this would create a mess. The hard work has been done. Over 61% of people are paying and new people are signing up all the time.”
A charges protest is being organised for outside Leinster House this Thursday, when the new Dail meets for the first time. The question is whether the politicisation of communities — measurable by higher voter turnouts than usual — is sustainable. Might water charges be a one-off issue?
“The short-term success of the campaign will be the abolition of charges and of Irish Water, but the long-term success will be the social solidarity; that people can come together in unity and deliver change,” said Ogle.
At the last Right2Change demonstration before the election, Doyle read a poem from the stage in College Green. It was called Politicians, Know Your Place. It finished with a line she had seen at the Occupy Wall Street protest: “If they won’t let us dream, we won’t let them sleep.”
Ireland’s water wars have shown politicians that is no longer an idle threat.