Politics of expediency on water charges flushed a cleaner future down the Swannee

Irish Water needs €5.5bn up to 2021 and that is only to start, but the funds now will have to come from the same purse as health and education, writes Gerard Howlin

IF FIANNA Fáil gets into government, water charges will haunt it.

Yesterday’s report from the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA), painted a picture of the country’s kitchen sink as a silage pit. Truth is that regardless of whether charges were successfully introduced or not, the same legacy issues would still be outstanding.

The difference is there would be a sustainable way forward. Now there isn’t.

Instead there is a legacy of underinvestment, added to by likely EU fines. Sewage treatment at 50 of Ireland’s 185 largest towns and cities is failing to prevent pollution and protect public health. It shouldn’t be, and it needn’t be. And that’s only the start.

If Fianna Fáil does get into government, they will likely think that ditching water charges, which was once their policy, was worth it.

Being competitive in urban constituencies, particularly Dublin, is the essential next step for it.

And Fianna Fáil has come a long way since 2011. In Dublin, it now has a chance of a seat in the five constituencies where it currently has none.

Dublin Rathdown would be a stretch, but there is also a chance of a second seat in Dublin Fingal. Winning just three of those five would narrow the current five-seat gap with Fine Gael. It’s game on.

There was a veneer of cover for their recidivism in the mess made by the Government in establishing Irish Water. It forced marched an organisation onto the map, into an already put-upon population.

But there was a principle at stake. The nexus of the financial crash was too narrow a tax base, and too high current public spending.

The banking debacle was big, but it was once off. If in the week that’s in it, it is clear that banking culture is a recurring problem, the unrecognised truth is that we have never faced up to the reality of having too narrow a tax base. It’s skating on thin ice.

We fell through the hole once and the tracker mortgage scandal is debris from that debacle. The cause and effect of all these things are actually closely related.

That’s not to speak of the environment. It’s the new piety. All pay lip service, and promptly resile from being the ones who have to do anything. We now have a minister for climate change, which is a good thing.

But he is not the minister for cars or cows. We are still waiting to hear from either on how their sectors are going to radically change and at what pace, to deal with emissions. All the while, sewage is pumped into rivers and the sea, and washes back onto the shore.

This is not Fianna Fáil’s “An Ireland for all” or Fine Gael’s “Republic of opportunity”. It’s disgusting. And it’s symbolic of much worse.

We have 50 large towns and cities where wastewater treatment failed to meet EU standards.

Forty-four areas are discharging untreated sewage. Counties Cork and Donegal account for nearly half of these areas. There is no treatment at all in Cobh. Fifty-nine areas where wastewater is the sole threat to rivers, lakes and coastal waters that are at risk of not achieving good status.

There’s much more.

The bottom line as told by the EPA yesterday is that we need much greater levels of capital investment. A billion litres of wastewater is generated each day — half of it doesn’t meet environmental standards.

But that’s not what will haunt Fianna Fáil, at least not yet. Everything the EPA outlined yesterday is built into the existing share price of political parties across the board.

Fine Gael took its hit on water. Labour drowned. Sinn Féin stayed afloat, just about.

Others thought they were riding the crest of a wave. These reports come out every year and are quickly forgotten, except in places directly affected.

And even there, if it’s all washed into the river or the sea, who cares?

Fewer than you might think actually. That’s the practical politics of this. The base assessment by Fianna Fáil was fundamentally correct.

But the haunting will come in government. Most things, most governments suffer from in their first term at least is what they did in opposition.

Irish Water needs €5.5bn between now and 2021, and that is only to start.

To those fools who marched and shouted about paying all this out of general taxation; now they have their way.

But the cynics who abetted them will carry the can in opportunity costs they will bitterly rue.

The Joint Committee on the Future Funding of Domestic Water Services signed up for this scale of investment.

We will see what’s provided in the capital plan to be published in December. That will be when the fun starts — except the laughs will be at our expense.

We are a country where 989,000 people paid water charges. Out of a mess, we were making the beginnings of something that should have worked.

Part of the original mess, and Eurostat put the tin hat on it, was that far from being excessive, water charges were so low compared to the economic cost, that Irish Water wasn’t really a standalone entity for accounting purposes at all.

But realistically priced water charges, could have funded an independent entity that would have borrowed off the national balance sheet, and driven needed investment.

Now if its ever provided, it comes from the same purse that teachers want for equal pay, that rail workers want for more pay, that might otherwise be available for health, childcare and whatever economic horrors Brexit brings.

Fianna Fáil have dug a hole for themselves.

The Government has slyly left another ticking time bomb for whoever comes next.  It’s the local property charge.

I haven’t mentioned either that the old age pension, is entirely unsustainable with or without an extra fiver. I could go on.

Long before the Colosseum was built, the glory of ancient Rome was the Cloaca Maxima or great sewer.

Built 600 years before the time of Christ, it is envied by the EPA today and it’s still to be seen.

Our sewers of a hundred years ago, those that we had, are rotting leaking pipes.

We haven’t built great sewers or aqueducts. Instead, our housing estates are built on the floodplains of rivers, just as global warming takes effect.

All of this is just ahead. The opportunity cost of forgoing a broader tax base is treacherous economic danger again.

Remember when you listen next about paltry investment in childcare, or inadequate support for mental health, and ask where is the money going?

It’s down the Swannee, a well-navigated Irish estuary.