In the water-charges package announced this week the Government not only sought to tackle the central concern of affordability by cutting and capping the charges but also sought to address the surrounding context and some of the peripheral issues. It is too soon to say definitively whether these proposals will assuage enough of the population to allow the Government move on from this crisis.
Even if Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly’s package defuses the long- running controversy about water it will not and cannot assuage the wider mood of anger and protest. The Government has had to accept that recent protests were about more than water. It follows, therefore, that solving the water issue will not change the wider mood much.
Public anger and distrust
There is a greater nastiness now in Irish politics than there has been in decades. There is a greater public anger and distrust of government than at any time previously, and the anger is more intense even than when the current crisis began. There is a greater volatility in our politics than there has been at any point since the foundation of the State. The public political mood is in a strange place and it could become even more volatile. The controversy and protest about water are both a symptom of and a contributor to this mood.
It bears repeating that the underlying social and economic factors that were at play in the dramatic outcomes of the 2011 general election still persist, and many of them will be more intense when the next election comes.
Unemployment is falling but the bulk of those unemployed in 2011 will still be unemployed in the spring of 2016; and while most of them were short-term unemployed then they will be long-term unemployed at the time of the next election.
Thousands and thousands of those at work are feeling increasingly squeezed even before they have to pay for water charges. The small tax cuts announced in the recent budget will not improve their mood much.
Those many, many householders who are trapped in property-related or other bank debt and who felt able to “kick the can” down the road at the start of the current economic crisis now find their situation has crystallised and the banks are being more belligerent.
The trauma of emigration and the deep- seated anger and resentment it has given rise to for those left behind continues to bubble just below the surface.
Overlaying these underlying factors are two additional elements that have emerged since the troika left at the end of last year.
The first is the political incompetence of the Government. It massively mishandled justice issues and medical cards before the local and European elections. it made a mess of the McNulty affair since then and it has spectacularly mishandled the establishment of Irish Water.
The extent to which the water controversy has undermined public trust is difficult to overstate. This week’s package is a comprehensive attempt to address public concerns but public trust in this Government and in politics generally is so badly damaged that even this attempt to remedy the situation is likely to compound public cynicism.
A couple of the changes announced on Wednesday illustrate this point.
PPS numbers
For months we have been told a load of nonsense about how Irish Water needed to be given personal public service (PPS) numbers so that householders could claim allowances. Now it turns out this situation could have been dealt with all along by the Department of Social Protection using the PPS information it already has.
The naming of this allowance as a water conservations grant is simply Orwellian wordplay. It would be more appropriately called a water benefit, akin to the child benefit. It is after all a Department of Social Protection payment to all households irrespective of their means and even if they do not conserve water. Although paid to householders, this payment is in fact a further subvention to Irish Water passed through this circuitous route for accounting purposes to enable the utility company to borrow separately from the sovereign debt.
The other element at play on the general political mood since the start of the year is the adjustment in public expectations. All the talk of the end of the bailout and of recovery led people to hope that their own recession would soon be over. Most of the population has endured five years of hardship with stoicism. They dared to raise their heads from the stress of the recession. While the recovery is real for some, most have not, or not yet, felt it in their own lives. This has led to understandable resentment from the majority who still feel left behind and who have long been quietly furious at the cost they have already paid for the economic crisis.
With or without a resolution of the water issue, our politics and our Government are still set for some very stormy times ahead.