It is difficult to believe that the whole Irish Water/Uisce Éireann saga has been on the go for more than ten years. In fact, it is almost exactly ten years since Irish Water was established as a subsidiary of An Bord Gáis as part of the Ervia group in 2013.
On January 1 this year, Irish Water was formally “re-established” as Uisce Éireann. In common with lots of things water related this is another changing the nameplate type of sleight of hand, although moves are now under way to incorporate all those who work in local authority water services into Uisce Éireann as employees of the new entity.
That will mean that the current Uisce Éireann workforce will expand from more than 1,200 to around 4,200. All of this was supposed to have been signed off on with the publication of the ‘Framework for future delivery of water services’ in June 2022.
That same month, the Government also announced plans to hold a referendum which would ensure that Uisce Éireann remains in public ownership.
That satisfied the unions, and in the usual manner of corporate Ireland, Patricia King former General Secretary of the Irish congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) has been appointed to the new board.
However, last week, local authority water services workers in a number of counties went on strike for 24 hours to demand an assurance that they be allowed retain their public service status, and also that the Government set a date for the referendum.
All of this brings me back to when I was working in Leinster House and the issue of water services and water charges was for several years one of the main political issues.
The whole thing had arisen from the banking crisis and the terms that were agreed as part of the bailout forced upon the Irish state by the EU and the International Monetary Fund with the backing of the then Obama/Biden administration in Washington. With friends like these, etc, etc …
One of the clauses imposed in the February 2011 ‘Economic Adjustment Programme’ was that the then Fianna Fáil/Green coalition would introduce water charges. There was a perhaps understandable suspicion that the EU and IMF might force the state to sell off successful parts of public utilities and even the forestry under the control of Coillte to pay back the debt incurred by an incompetent and corrupt financial sector.
This led to a widespread campaign of opposition that reflected a lot of the anger that followed the bailout, and which subsequently led to the electoral thrashing of the two parties who signed up to it.
In the 2011 general election, Fianna Fáil lost 51 seats and the Greens were wiped out as a Leinster House party. However, their replacements in Fine Gael and Labour were bound by the EU/IMF programme and thus seemingly committed to introducing water charges. It presented a golden opportunity for the far left, who initially made the running locally in Dublin, and for Sinn Féin.
As the protests grew there was a rather comical game of oneupmanship between the Trots and the Shinners. Sinn Féin were targeting the respectable vote, and so at first were saying that, while they were opposed to charges, they would not advocate not paying them, and that they – being individual and responsible TDs – would pay them.
This was manna to the Trots who were able to portray the Shinners as soft on the issue, and landed them a huge victory in the Dublin South West bye-election in October 2014 which was won by Paul Murphy.
The Shinners then went full on and took over the campaign and were mostly responsible for bringing 100,000 people to a demonstration at Leinster House in December 2014.
The Trots simply couldn’t compete with Sinn Féin on that level.
(The manner in which Sinn Féin scuppered the ambitions of Brendan Ogle who saw the whole thing as a chance to launch himself as a sort of latter day Jem Larkin and was hinting at a free run at a seat, was a Machiavellian thing of beauty, in fairness. And no harm either.)
I was one of the group in Leinster House which was responsible for co-ordinating all of this, and witnessed the near panic at times as Sinn Féin tried to come up with ways to appear more radical than the far left, but not too radical to frighten the Labour-inclined liberal middle class vote which had become the apple of their eye.
Anyone who pointed out that Irish Water was already a state company and that therefore calling for it to be nationalised was simply nonsense were not listened to. The amount of people who actually believed that Irish Water was a private company was astonishing, and few among those stirring the pot were inclined to set them right on this.
No more popular was anyone who pointed out that water services cost money to run no matter what way they were paid for, through general taxation or charges, and that claiming to pay for it all “off balance sheet” might have sounded impressive but did nothing to avoid the fundamental fact that water is not “free from the rivers to the sea.”
Anyway, the last laugh was had by Fianna Fáil who were even more deeply cynical and opportunistic than their republican rivals and who decided not only to come out strongly against what they had agreed themselves in 2011, but also said that they would abolish Irish Water itself.
This was a move to boost their chances in the general election of 2016, and it was remarkably successful in that it clearly put a limit on the gains for Sinn Féin and the far left who had been riding high in the polls for most of the previous two years.
The 2022 Uisce Éireann report was published recently, and is a good insight into the scale and importance of the water sector. The company controls assets worth close to €6.4 billion, almost €6 billion of which is accounted for by the water infrastructure. It had revenues of €1.3 billion in 2022of which €961 million was accounted for by the state subvention. It that regard, it illustrates that the supplying of safe water is certainly not free.
Uisce Éireann, or Irish Water as was, had total operational costs of €885 million and an income of just €348 million from commercial users. To make up the shortfall through domestic charges, it was estimated that the average household cost would have been somewhere around €12 per week. It is a relatively small amount, although understandably people were not enthusiastic about acquiring another direct fix charge.
The issue of water charges has disappeared but the demand for a referendum to ensure that water services are not privatised provides a lingering hook on which the left can play up the “fear of the future privatisation of Irish Water.”
Whether that was ever a possibility is anyone’s guess. Nor would it be a good idea given that the snapping up of public utilities by bottom feeding “entrepreneurs” getting a free start from the taxpayer doesn’t appear to have been a success anywhere else.
We still pay for it all one way or the other and water services remain in public ownership so in retrospect the controversy after 2011 appears somewhat of an anachronism.
The demand that a state company be re-nationalised remains just as comical as it ever was and says a lot about the lack of imagination and clear economic alternatives on the part of those who cling onto it like a comfort blanket.