A chara, – After paying for water charges since coming to London three years ago from Donegal, I think it is fair to pay for the service. If it’s not paid for, then there is nothing to invest in improving the service. I agree that a lot of the water services in Ireland are substandard and the infrastructure less than appropriate, but if someone doesn’t pay for it, it will never be improved.
That said, I really can’t get my head around the nonsense of the charges – one person is this charge, three children are another, etc. At what point is a child “chargeable”? If a child goes away to university and is home at the weekend, are they charged for the two days at home? What about families where one spouse is away in Canada half the time – do they have to register for the few precious weeks they spend at home with their children? What about people who spend days looking after their sick or elderly relatives on a regular basis? Are they charged at their own home or the home of the person they look after?
My husband and I pay around £25 a month for water. But we have the advantage in the UK of there being choice in the supplier. Yes, some homes are metered and others are not and they work it out, but this situation of how many people live at a property is insane! We should learn from others, and not create a system from nothing, a system that is virtually impossible to understand and to keep track of. – Is mise,
MARY LANE,
London.
Sir, – The suggestion that water services could be the subject of a constitutional referendum is outlandish ("Alan Kelly refuses to rule out vote on Irish Water ownership", November 5th).
The Minister for the Environment ought to acquaint himself with the unhappy experience of Germany after it embarked on such a venture. When its postwar constitution was drafted in 1948, a provision was included that explicitly placed all of the country’s motorways in state ownership, a clause which survives to this day. The unforeseen consequence of this became clear decades later when the German Constitutional Court ruled that any attempts by the German federal government to develop the motorways through public-private partnerships were unconstitutional and that only publicly funded development was permissible.
The Government has already held six referendums since it came to office and has pledged further votes on same-sex marriage, the voting age, and the age of presidential candidates, all of which are Labour Party vanity projects of no relevance to those seeking employment or struggling to pay the bills. So why on earth should we add another potentially dangerous referendum into this mix?
The management of our water services should be left in the hands of the Oireachtas and future governments that will ultimately be accountable to the people for any decisions they make. – Yours, etc,
BARRY WALSH
Clontarf, Dublin 3.