Irish mammy will be a ’lunatic’ over the water charges

UNINTENDED consequences: the focus on water charges over the last while has, rightly, been on things like handing over our PPSNs. We don’t know where that data is going to end up. Will it be left in a laptop in a taxi, after an EPIC Friday night, and then the emails you normally get from the ‘Widow of Brigadier Celestine Agabi, formerly of the Ivory Coast’, will start getting a heck of a lot more specific?

And, of course, there are the tens of millions of euro spent on consultants. But if it makes you feel any better, some of the ‘consulting’ money was legitimately spent on IT systems. ‘Consultants’ are often coders and web designers, but they’re called consultants as it sounds better around the parish. I should know. I was a consultant once and I wrote computer code.

However, there are other consequences. Water charges are going to seep into the public psyche, and genuinely change the way we think about using water.