Government has simply poured money down the drain
We should not underestimate the impact of the Eurostat ruling. It completely removes the rationale for Irish Water and water charges. After Eurostat, there is no policy, no direction, no strategy. Ministers will downplay the ruling with a ‘move-on-nothing-to-see-here’ rhetoric, punctuated by a ‘there-is-no-alternative’ but all this does is expose the inability to grasp how fundamentally the landscape has changed.
Whatever they say in public, ministers must know it is game over. The only way to pass the Eurostat test is to introduce ‘economically significant prices’. This would mean reverting to prices based on usage with no cap determined by an independent regulator. Is that likely?
