Plenty of scope to waste water under Eoghan Murphy’s hands-off plan

This time five years ago, the then Fine Gael-Labour coalition nearly fell apart amid bitter disputes over the prospect of water charges, writes Political Editor Daniel McConnell.

By rushing a 10-year job of creating a new utility that was Irish Water and selling the idea of charging for water to the public into 18 months, the issue exploded like a bomb and both parties suffered heavy losses in the subsequent local and European elections in May 2014.

Tomorrow, the Cabinet will hold its weekly meeting and among the items for discussion will be a memorandum from Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy. Under his brief falls the thorny issue of Irish Water and its future funding model.

Murphy will brief his ministerial colleagues about the proposal for how to deal with customers who use water excessively, as he will call it —water-wasters in layman’s terms.

Given the vicious backlash against Fine Gael and Labour in 2014 on the water charges issue and the poisonous effect it has had on the political system ever since, our dear leaders are petrified when it comes to talking of charges, even when it comes to water-wasters.

In 2017, the Government assumed that the average four-person household uses 125,000 litres of water per year.

In a bid to ensure as few people as possible would exceed any limit set down, the Government decided to grant an allowance per household of 213,000 litres per year, or 1.7 times the actual amount used.

So, were you to find yourself using more than the 213,000 litres, then something is obviously wrong.

Either you have a drastic leak on the property side of your water meter, or you are deliberately and continuously wasted water to an extreme level, such as taking a bath every hour or running your garden hose all year round to fill your aqua pool.

Murphy’s memo will set out that those who find themselves above the threshold limit will be first contacted by letter to inform them of their high use.

Under plans devised between Irish Water and Murphy’s department, households who find themselves above the threshold are to be given up to a year to address their problems.

After that timeframe, should they find themselves still over the limit, then, and only then will fines kick in.

Irish Water is keen to stress that this fines regime is not about revenue-raising, even though it estimates it will bring in €7m in the first year in operation in 2020.

That figure is estimated to grow to €9m within five years, according to the utility’s submission to the Commission for Regulation of Utilities.

Irish Water’s figures are based on an expectation that between 75,000 and 80,000 households will be paying the average capped domestic water rate of €260 a year.

At present, despite many water and wastewater treatment plants operating at maximum capacity, an estimated 7% of domestic water customers use more than 1.7 times average household demand.

While Irish Water is seeking to paint this as a conservation measure, the truth is that this is a hands-off policy writ large, driven by pure political fear.

No government, and certainly not a government as fragile as the current one, would want to re-start the war on water charges. Especially not in the run-up to European and local elections in May and the high chance of a general election within 12 months.