The future is being re-mortgaged by the failure of Irish Water plans
It won’t make the blindest bit of difference how much you use: You still pay the same. The revenue will not be sufficient to make the investments we were told were essential.
It’s a case of kicking the can down the road — and it’s cowardice. Yes today’s much-leaked climbdown was inevitable, but it was avoidable and it is a disgrace. It is political survival now, delivered at the cost of good government over the long term. Tellingly it is the end of the road for the once-bright promise of reform ushered in by the election of this government.
Today we are officially back to the future, back again to a failed system of politics as usual. People are being placated with their own money — this time in opportunity-cost for the competitiveness of the economy. Having gotten what we, or some of us, demanded; now, we will all eventually have to pay the real cost with interest.
The interest payments begin immediately in terms of taxes paid, on interest on debt, that will have to be incurred to subvent centrally, what should be charged and paid for by individual users.The future is being remortgaged.
A toxic legacy of ultimately higher taxes, paid over a longer time to subvent infrastructure that will be second rate for much longer than it needs to be, will be the cost. But we have got what we want, so I hope we are happy.
Ultimately the political function of government is not engineering expertise; it is leadership. It is about ensuring the agencies are competently led so they can deliver the complex services a modern society requires. The over-arching function of government is to have a clear, achievable vision and the innately political capacity to cause people to believe in that vision. The Government has run out of vision and of political capacity, and it’s very little to do with water or water charges. There is a deeper malaise. At some point, quite some time ago, people made up their minds that this Government wasn’t up for any real, meaningful reform of the existing political system. This debacle is only the backlash.
Most crusades fail. The problem with ours is that it was never really attempted. And therein is the crux. Water charges were not the symbol of the profound change they should have been. Instead, via Irish Water they were seen as bedding down in freshly harvested clover, an old, parasitical system that outrageously rewarded monopoly producers of public services at the expense of a paying-through-the-nose public. The wrong turn in the road was in setting up Irish Water, like the HSE in 2004, on terms and conditions that were out of kilter with what they should be paid, and which most people on the receiving end of a water charge, could only dream of. In the fourth year of the life of this government, its failure to meaningfully challenge vested interest within the public service — in the public interest — is complete. Its recent and anaemic proposals for reform of the civil service are further proof of that. We still live in a state where the concept of responsibility is amorphous. But there is no doubt where the buck stops. It stops with the taxpayer, who far from gaining any relief because of today’s announcement, will ultimately pay more — in return for less. It is a truly astonishing achievement.
The much-hyped imbroglio at Jobstown in Tallaght on Saturday itself has long antecedents. It was partly an expression of public anger, partly an explosion of thuggery, and unquestionably a symptom of the complete failure of the legislature to fulfil a basic requirement in any democracy.
The rushed, politically bullying, passage of the Irish Water legislation through the Dáil without adequate debate has led to the establishment of a public body that from the get-go is a crock. Tánaiste Joan Burton once rhapsodised about Irish Water being a public endeavour on the inspirational scale of the founding of the ESB. She was almost right, and completely wrong. It could and should have been an inspirational civic endeavour. Instead, rushed, risible and with stunning contempt for parliamentary consideration it is a grotesque makeover of the modern state near-monopoly, feasting in a protected enclosure of protected prices, and effectively unassailable by market realities.
Her treatment by thugs on Saturday was on a personal level wholly wrong. In its violence, its abusive name-calling and political outcome it is an allegory of deeply rooted dysfunction. The parody is that those who will ultimately lose the most, firstly from the lack of underlying political reform that led to this crisis of political management for the government and then to the ham-fisted half climb-down today, are the most deprived communities in the country. Jobstown was built because of an appalling planning system, rooted in wholly incompetent and partly corrupt politics. In the current perpetuation of that system, it is the very community with most to lose again.
Joan Burton and her staff were wrongly entrapped in her car for more than two hours for a very calculating political purpose. A feeding frenzy is now on for the political carrion that is the Irish body politic. The Anti-Austerity Alliance, People before Profit, and Sinn Féin are in furious competition for the carcass. Each shares a highly authoritarian, controlled ethos. Sensing power, but never having had responsibility, they are now unbridled in a bidding war to bottle public outrage, and then decant it as political support.
The contempt for the personal integrity of a public figure on the streets on Saturday, was a continuation in cynicism of the blatant contrivance of mock-outrage by Mary Lou McDonald and Sinn Féin in the Dáil last Thursday.
They brought, whatever its inadequacy, our parliamentary process to a standstill simply to move attention away from their own dark past. Refusing point blank to answer questions in the Dáil over previous weeks, they invented indignation over the supposed refusal of the Tánaiste to answer a parliamentary question.
Anyone who has listened to McDonald brazenly recite non-answers to key questions about her party’s past or her leader, understands her real level of respect for the public’s right to hear real answers to pressing questions. Lest the diversionary tactic be blunted last Thursday, they then sought to pitch the Ceann Comhairle into the cauldron as well. The bigger the bonfire, the more destruction, the better, it seems.
We were promised democratic revolution. The government abandoned that, before it began.
The revolution in progress now does not smell like the perfume of democracy to me.
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