Irish Water debacle - Abandoning mandate is real failure

Even if the suggestion that Chancellor Angela Merkel drew a line in the sand more than a good country mile short of the kind of concessions Prime Minister David Cameron imagined might be made to prevent Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union has been reinterpreted to soften that inevitable reality check from Berlin, there is a simple lesson for our Government in its difficulties over Irish Water in that weekend spat.

Ms Merkel is not for appeasing extremes, rather she is determined that the middle will hold and the overarching objectives of the EU— stability, peace, prosperity, commonality and tolerance — shall prevail. She will not, rightly, facilitate Mr Cameron by making concessions that might help him outflank right-wing usurpers UKIP to protect Conservatives’ seats in the Commons. Rather she will defend the opportunities for all EU citizens inherent in the community’s freedom-of-movement, freedom-to-work cornerstone. The vast majority of EU citizens would wholeheartedly support her position.

Applying the same principle Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s Government should, as it prepares to launch Irish Water II, remember that the case for water charges is as solid as ever, that the need to repair water infrastructure grows by the day and that the principle that the user pays is fair and appropriate. The urgency around water conservation is so pressing it hardly needs to be argued.

The Coalition, especially Fine Gael, should with considerable humility, accept that had the establishment of the utility been carried out with the kind of proficiency expected of a transition-year business project then last Saturday’s marches might not have been so well supported.

Mr Kenny’s Government should also re-read its election manifesto and remind itself that, even if its most cynical members thought it little more than a sales pitch, the sleaze-weary electorate did not. It should remember it was entrusted with moving our public life beyond the kind of croneyism all too obvious at Irish Water. It should remind itself that it was entrusted with power to end the kind of snout-in-the-trough gorging for consultants, far beyond anything ever imagined in the Galway Races tent, that Irish Water facilitated before it even delivered a litre of water. It should remind itself that it was elected to confront the feather-bedding undermining the credibility of too many semi-state companies. If Irish Water was to have made these objectives real then the failure goes far beyond inefficiency and poor communications. Government should consider too Jack O’Connor’s warning that a failing, insolvent Irish Water is too vulnerable to privatisation. It should also copper-fasten public ownership through a constitutional amendment.

Government’s real problem is that it has so few get-out-of-jail cards left and if it concentrates on just cutting charges it will have missed the point. Irish Water must be remade in a way that shows the old gombeenism is dead and real change in public life is possible. Anything less would be a betrayal on a par with the infamies it so freely accuses its predecessors of.