Opinion: Anti-water campaigners protest too much. Their real goal is power

THEY don’t care about the water. It’s just a tool to destabilise the Government and accumulate power. It’s what they do. It’s what they’ve always done — find an issue with which they can mobilise people, then go and do it.

The main movers in the campaign against water charges, whether they be the ‘Stop the Water Tax’ Socialist Party, the other factions within the Anti-Austerity Alliance or some anarchist movement, are the same people who tried and failed to organise around the bin tax in 2004, and who scuppered the last attempt to charge for water, in 1996. They are essentially the same people who defeated the poll tax in the UK, in 1990.

Don’t get me wrong: from where I’m sitting, the poll tax was regressive and it came on top of 11 years of Margaret Thatcher, whose governments’ damage to the UK is clearly visible to this day. But the significance of that campaign to us, in Ireland now, is the model, not the issue. The strategy of the campaign was to pick a new tax — which no-one ever likes — and organise resistance through demonstrations and non-payment.