Government deal - Devil is in the lack of details

THEY say the devil is in the detail, Well, that certainly applies to the lack of clarity in a key part of the document issued by Fianna Fáil on the deal brokered with Fine Gael to facilitate a minority government.

Loosely referred to as “A confidence and supply arrangement for a Fine Gael-led government”, the document contains one particular line which is already causing much confusion about the payment of bills from Irish Water, the most contentious issue in Irish politics and one which has brought tens of thousands of angry people onto the streets for protest marches.

The line in question is the somewhat vague statement that those who have paid their bills “will be treated no less favourably than those who have not paid”. What does it mean? Given the broad brushstroke used in an obvious attempt to gloss over this potentially explosive issue, the phrasing is as near to meaningless gobbledegook as you are likely to come across.

Asked what people should do when they receive their water bills in the coming days, knowing that water charges will be suspended in six weeks’ time for nine months — and longer, if required — Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin replied that the party’s policy was that people should pay their bills and uphold the law.

The approach agreed between the parties towards those who refuse to pay their bills is that they should be pursued for payment. Meanwhile, they are also singing from the same hymn sheet in that they agree those people who pay their bills will not get their money back, thus contradicting the line adopted by outgoing minister Richard Bruton last week when he said fairness dictated that those who had paid should get it back.

In reality, from an economic viewpoint it makes little sense to pursue the non-payers because the amounts involved are so small. Pursuing debtors is such a costly business that it makes no sense to hire debt collectors to go after them in the case of Irish Water. As an economic rule of thumb set by the State, a figure of €500 is regarded as the minimum threshold worth going after. The official policy is that it would simply not be viable to pursue anyone owing less than that.

If Fianna Fáil and the government were to attempt to introduce a lower threshold, they would be accused of hounding people for political reasons. The difficulty with this sort of political decision-making is that ministers could end up layering bad policy on top of bad policy because the fundamentals are not sound.

Other aspects of the document are driven by Fianna Fáil’s laudable craving for new ways of doing politics and as such deserve to be welcomed. For instance, the deal hammered out between the parties envisages a reformed budgetary process whereby opposition bills, apart from money bills to pass, would be allowed to pass to the second stage and then proceed to committee stage within a period of ten working weeks. On the face of it, such an agreement would appear to make a great deal of sense — until, that is, the system breaks down along the old seismic fault lines of traditional Irish politics.