The Government is struggling to come to grips with the public anger about Irish Water. Imposing a new charge on households for a service previously funded largely out of general tax revenues was never going to be easy. However the mishandling of many of the issues by Irish Water and the Government itself has helped to turn a difficult situation into an incendiary one. The original concept remains sound. Huge investment in the water infrastructure is needed and has to be paid for somehow. There are also good environmental reasons to undertake these repairs and for incentivising people to use as little water as possible. However all this has been lost in the heat of the debate now under way.
It is not possible to satisfy all the protesters, short of dropping the whole idea of the charges and abolishing Irish Water entirely. Even if this were possible, it would leave everything back at square one in terms of the state of our water infrastructure and the lack of funds for investment. It would also cause serious problems for the Government’s 2015 debt and deficit calculations.
But simply pressing ahead and hoping everything will be alright is not an option either. Bad communication is part of the problem, but there are fundamental issues, too, in how Irish Water has been established and how the charges are being introduced. Nor can the Government use the “HSE defence” here – blaming everything on an agency which it established.
Part of this relates to the timetable on which the charges are being introduced. Meters are installed in some places, but will not be for quite some time in others, and nobody is quite sure what their bill will be once full charging commences. It would make sense to operate with a fixed charge for a longer period, while also alerting people to what their bill would have been had normal charging been applied. This would give households time to adjust their behaviour and also allay at least some of the fears that bills are going to put a major imposition on their finances. It would also give time to fix major leaks outside households, before a pay for use system comes into place. The charging structure for fixing leaks also needs to be clarified, as does the ability of households to hire other contractors to do the work for less.
The structure of Irish Water also needs to be overhauled and its communications with the public improved. As with the HSE, Irish Water is inheriting a lot of legacy issues in terms of staff numbers, pay arrangements and how the service is run. So it did not start with a clean slate. However from the hiring of consultants, to communications with the public to the staff bonus controversy it could not have handled things much worse. The Government cannot run Irish Water, but it can insist that an organisation within the state sector is properly run and operates on an accountable basis.