Water proposals - Plan ends some of the confusion

The Government is, by its own hand, mired in a communications disaster approaching something like Cowenesque darkness.

The entirely avoidable, amateur blundering around the residential property tax, the needless climb-down on sceptic tanks, and, in recent days, pointless, credibility-squandering confusion about how water charges will be introduced, administered or levied, suggest that this comedy of errors could quickly turn to tragedy.

The same applies to the turf-cutting farce where the Government almost pretends that the EU legislation might go away or, in some new saints-and-scholars way, eventually be circumvented and the destruction of our remaining bogs — for private gain — continues unchecked.

Fine Gael’s unsatisfactory and disingenuously mercurial position on Denis O’Brien, or its reluctance to act decisively on findings made in the Mahon report against Dublin South TD Olivia Mitchell, only add to the sense that someone with a steady hand needs to quickly grasp the tiller.

Yesterday’s announcement by Environment Minister Phil Hogan that Irish Water will be a subsidiary of Bord Gáis, and that water meters would be paid for by individuals over an extended period, begins to put shape on how a new water regime might look and goes some way to ending some of the confusion.

Though it is reassuring that our water services are to remain directly in state control through a semi-state company, the decision to involve so much of the structure that has been less than exemplary in the past may be questionable. Of course local authorities did not have the resources to provide the services they, or we, might wish, but today we need something that signals a new beginning and not the past dressed up in a new uniform. It may have been unrealistic to expect anything else but Irish Water will be as important to this society as the ESB once was and, as climate change forces us to become more respectful of the resource, possibly even more so.

Irish Water faces a huge challenge and satisfying the country’s water needs is only part of it.