Mother vows her stand against Irish Water will go on despite arrest
Karen Doyle, age 43, from Cobh, Co Cork, said she is as determined as ever to peacefully resist the installation of water meters, despite facing possible prosecution.
“I am as determined today as I was yesterday or last year,” said Ms Doyle.
“We are organising at local level. This is a grassroots movement and tens of thousands of people are now speaking out. We have seen this over the last few weeks and we will see it again this weekend with protests across the country.”
Ms Doyle was one of three people arrested yesterday after a stand-off with Irish Water contractors in the Woodside estate in the Rushbrooke area of Cobh, where householders have been resisting installation for more than three weeks.
Ms Doyle, a member of Cobh Says No To Water Charges, said she believed a verbal agreement was in place with the contractors that they would not install meters outside homes displaying ‘no consent, no contract’ posters.
However, she said everything changed yesterday when contractors tried to install meters at homes of some of the objectors.
About 50 people mounted a blockade and Ms Doyle and two men stood over a stopcock to prevent installation work.
Gardaí were called and warned the three they faced arrest for obstruction under the Water Services Act 2007 if they did not move.
“I was standing on the stopcock with the two men when I saw another work barrier being put up outside the home of another woman,” said Ms Doyle.
“There was a mother, holding the hands of two of her children, standing over her stopcock, and I thought there is another mother doing what she believes is correct.”
When they refused to budge, the protesters were arrested and taken to Cobh garda station where they were formally charged, cautioned and released.
“The gardaí were very respectful,” said Ms Doyle. “There was no cheering from the protestors. Everything was very calm.”
She returned to the estate, where protestor numbers had swelled to around 150 people. The contractors withdrew from the estate just before 1pm.
Ms Doyle described Irish Water as a “disaster” and said people just can not afford another bill.
“We’ve been holding street meetings on this issue for months and a lot of mothers have come to me afterwards to tell me they are feeding their kids cup-a-soup and bread for dinner,” said Ms Doyle. “We are already paying for water in our taxes. And that’s the way it should continue.”
Cobh Labour councillor Cathal Rasmussen said he was disappointed about the arrests, describing them as a “serious turn of events”.
“People are entitled to protest peacefully,” he said. “An agreement was reached, as I understand, not to put meters in houses with posters. This agreement was breached and Irish Water showed the heavy side of its organisation.
“It’s typical of Irish Water and the attitude they have to the ordinary people.”
Anti-water charge group Right2Water has organised nearly 80 demonstrations tomorrow which it hopes will bring over 100,000 protesters onto the streets. It is also planning a major demonstration outside the Dáil on December 10 to show TDs at first hand the level of anger at water charges.
Nearly 30 demonstrations have been organised in and around Dublin. Five each are to take place in Limerick, Cork, Wicklow and Tipperary. The majority are scheduled to take place between noon and 2pm.
The biggest in Limerick will be at Bedford Row at 2pm, while the Cork city demonstration takes place at the same time at Grand Parade.
One demonstration is planned for Kerry which will take place at 1pm at the Horan Centre, Tralee.
The Galway venue is the Spanish Arch at 1pm and in Kilkenny it will be at the train station 30 minutes later.
Richard Boyd-Barrett, one of the organisers, said they decided to move the focus to smaller demonstrations as Right2Water wanted to “deepen grassroots support”.
The organisation held a demonstration in Dublin on October 11 which was attended by around 100,000 people.
“We are absolutely confident we will significantly exceed that figure with Saturday’s demonstrations. We want to embed this movement in local communities,” Mr Boyd-Barrett said.
The organisation is also urging protesters to sign petitions which will be collected on the day and which will be handed onto Government TDs.
“We are planning another massive demonstration outside the Dáil on December 10 and more in the New Year.”
He claimed the Government was reeling from the increasing popular anger against the charges.
“They are in absolute tatters and they don’t know what to do. These protests have shocked them to the core and they are backtracking at a ferocious rate,” he said. Info: right2water.ie/events
They may have been united in their condemnation of the utility company’s malfunctioning, but there was a watershed moment yesterday as Sinn Féin eventually got Fianna Fáil to admit they are in favour of charging for the liquid.
At last Monday’s Cork County Council meeting, SF members, most notably Melissa Mullane, pressed the mayor of County Cork, and FF leader on the council, Alan Coleman, about where his party stood on charges.
During a lengthy debate on the Irish Water debacle, Mr Coleman was at pains to give nothing away.
However, yesterday, in the face of a flood of Sinn Féin criticism about Fianna Fáil sitting on the fence, Mr Coleman eventually deluged the Irish Examiner with his party’s policy on the matter.
Yes, they are in favour of charging for water “as it broadens the tax base.”
Mr Coleman said that the party believed all charges should be suspended “pending a full, root and branch review of the operations of Irish Water”.
“When this review is finalised, then we should look at whether the company should be abolished entirely or restructured,” he said.
Mr Coleman then tried to shift the blame for the whole debacle onto the Government parties.
“The budgetary position this year allowed the Government some flexibility to give people some breaks,” he said. “But then it chose to plough ahead with the introduction of water charges.”
Mr Coleman said Irish Water was “presently unfit for purpose” and “householders’ spending power had still not recovered sufficiently from the recession to warrant the further imposition of charges on them.”
Ms Mullane said she was “glad that Fianna Fáil had finally come off the fence.”
However, she said that if the next general election threw up the possibility of a FF/SF coalition then the former would have to think again about its support for water charges.
“This is a red line issue for us and we would not go into coalition with them if they continued to support water charges.”
Irish Water bosses found themselves between a Deep River Rock and a hard place when protesters burst into a meeting they were holding with local public representatives.
It wasn’t lost on the 25 or more protesters who disrupted the meeting that, at the top table, Irish Water bosses were drinking the bottled water manufactured by Coca Cola.
They wondered out loud why the utility company’s bigwigs weren’t prepared to drink the stuff which comes out of the tap.
Or perhaps it is a subtle sign that Coca Cola is waiting in the wings to buy it out, some suggested.
Ironic, seeing as Irish Water want to charge people for the pleasure of knocking back the stuff that does actually fall from the sky but their management prefer it out of a bottle.
Ironic, also, that the meeting was happening at the aptly named Silver Springs Hotel, Cork.
Then there were the complimentary mints on tables. They were liberated by some of the intruding protesters, and then handed out to a number of councillors who were, by this time, trying to resolve the invasion.
The protesters barged into the meeting a few minutes after councillors from Cork and Kerry started to ask Irish Water the “awkward questions”.
The first was why wasn’t the media allowed into the meeting? The reply: They weren’t invited to the seven previous regional meetings held around the country by the company. Councillors protested, but to no avail.
News of this filtered out of the conference centre and, seconds later, the protesters outside dropped their placards (slogans included ‘Death to Irish Water’ and ‘Water Rats Here’) and rushed the conference centre.
One of the security guards did a gallant job of holding them at bay, without losing his bottle, for the best part of two minutes.
But, as a large flower pot crashed onto the floor, he was overwhelmed and protesters flooded in to confront those at the top table.
A stand-off of more than an hour-and-a-half ensued as the Mayor of County Cork, Fianna Fáil councillor Alan Coleman, and Sinn Féin councillors Thomas Gould and Des O’Grady tried to broker agreement.
They suggested that a couple of the protesters could stay and ask questions. Workers Party councillor Ted Tynan, who was with the protesters, said that this was acceptable if the rest of them could sit quietly at the back.
Several councillors felt it was unlikely that the protesters would keep a dignified silence and eventually Irish Water head of customer relations Paul O’Donoghue made the call.
He said the event wasn’t an open meeting and it wouldn’t go ahead if the bulk of the protesters and the media stayed in the room.
The gardaí had arrived at this stage and watched as the protesters made a peaceful retreat and that was the end of that.
No meeting, no “awkward” questions answered. Just cold water poured over the whole sorry affair.
Irish Water has insisted it has “robust” data protection policies in place, despite the company’s lack of an information security manager.
It yesterday emerged that the utility is advertising the position of Information Security and Data Protection Manager with the company. This comes months after it began the process of collecting personal data from the public and a week after the Data Protection Commissioner confirmed Irish Water had sent tenants’ bank details to their landlords in error.
The ad for the new role, posted on Wednesday, called for a candidate who can assess, monitor, and control risks arising from transfer of information to and from external organisations as well as develop and implement an assurance plan over the critical Information Security and Data Protection risks facing Irish Water.
A spokeswoman for Irish Water insisted, however, that suitable protocols have been in place at the company and it has so far adopted the data protection policies of its parent company, Ervia.
“Since the inception of Irish Water robust information security and data protection policies have been in place through the adoption of the Ervia Group Information Security & Data Protection Policies,” she said.
Fianna Fáil’s Barry Cowen said the latest revelations reinforce his call for the suspension of water charges.
“Revelations that a data protection manager has yet to be hired, that bonuses will continue to be paid and confusion over the new board of Ervia reinforce Fianna Fáil’s call for the suspension of water charges until a review of the company and its pay structures is conducted,” he said.
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