MOST GOVERNMENTS EVENTUALLY collapse under their own weight. They create too many scandals, govern with too many inconsistencies and lose the trust of the people. Otherwise sensible – or at least bearable – issues outgrow the capacity of the government to deal with them and they take the whole show crashing down.
This government is doing a pretty good job of engineering its downfall through the mechanism of Irish Water. As a consequence we are sleepwalking towards a general election in 12 to 18 months where we are likely to see hard line Marxists, single issue independents and dubious populists in a position to take the reins and run the country back into the ground from which it is presently emerging.
Water taxes were coming, one way or another. Fianna Fáil and the Greens signed us up to them as part of the Troika agreement. In general, as I’ve written before, the notion of consumption-based taxes to pay for things like water is a good one. People who use more, pay more; and it promotes conservation. The trouble is that when you don’t offset the taxes that used to pay for the service and it simply becomes a tax increase.
Fact is, however, that we are still running a massive deficit. This year we have borrowed €8 billion to run our public services, and we will borrow again next year and not achieve a balanced budget until 2018 at the earliest. Much of the debt we have taken on in recent years has been to fund the shortfall in government funding, rather than – as popular sentiment would have it – to pay for bad banking debts. These are significant, but they represent the minority share of the government borrowings over the past few years that have resulted in increased debt interest repayments.
Irish Water is a giant quango
The trouble with Irish Water has been the omnishambles of its inception. It is difficult to imagine how otherwise ostensibly politically-savvy people conceived of Irish Water in its current form and continued to dig themselves into a hole by their continued support of it.
Irish Water is almost the perfect example of why I generally don’t trust government administration to run so much as a bath. It is a giant quango, for a start. Government loves being seen to set up a State Board, Authority or Company to appear to be doing something that is already perfectly adequately serviced.
Water infrastructure and staff already exist, at the local authority level. Irish people were able to turn on their taps and lo, a clear liquid would pour forth. Government then commissioned a massive new layer of well-paid bureaucracy to come in and sit atop the existing structure.
Irish Water, like all respectable quangos, needs its own offices in which to house a fancy new CEO and senior management team. They, naturally, need cars and allowances and extra administration staff. For your building you need a logo to hang above the reception (manned by newly employed receptionists) at a cost of several million euros from a fancy marketing agency.
You need management consultants and all the rest to build yet more bureaucracy, and you need to staff it by combination of transferring existing local authority people and creating new roles to fill in all the holes aforementioned consultants then identified.
At the very beginning, this set Irish people on edge. At least when the property tax came in it was just a charge, and Revenue took it off you. Grand. Irish Water looks a lot more like a giant waste of money or, worse, preparation for privatisation at public expense.
The question of privatisation
The Irish people don’t like privatisation. There have been bad experiences with it. Generally I’m all for privatising many of the ridiculous State industries, arguing that government doesn’t actually have much business managing the greyhound industry and the like. When it comes to infrastructure, such as water, I make an exception. Generally it is only government that can plan far enough ahead and invest enough to make certain types of infrastructure viable, even if in partnership with the private sector. See road building as a good example.
The nature of the water taxes and how they were constructed is another bone of contention. Water metering is the fairest way to charge, of course, though politically I can’t ever have seen Bertie Ahern scheduling the instillation of meters to coincide with a local election campaign. It speaks to the level of political naivety in the Irish Water saga that this happened, though I suppose a fair soul could give Fine Gael and Labour points for political honesty.
The trouble is that there has been relatively little thought given to hardship and ability to pay of Irish Water customers. Elements introduced in the budget seemed more a reaction to protests than a well thought through system, and further concessions seem to be in the offing as the protests continue.
Furthermore, this highly paid bureaucracy seems to be flying by the seat of its pants entirely when it comes to key policies, such as whether or not landlords are liable for non-paying tenants.
The doubtlessly expensive PR machine is swinging wildly around, and government appears to be reacting rather than controlling this new beast it has set upon the country. The instinct of government Ministers – up to Labour politicians like Joan Burton who should, frankly, know better – is to attack and belittle the opponents of the tax. These folks are acting out of a real sense of grievance and they are not, by and large, scroungers and miscreants. They are expressing an honest and deeply felt sense of anger at government policy, and making insinuations against them is just a faster route to getting turfed out of office.
Further political instability approaching the next election
All of this is leading to political instability. The Socialist Party, under the guise of the Anti-Austerity Alliance, beat Sinn Fein for what was a near dead cert seat for the latter in last week’s Dublin South West by-election. The reason that Paul Murphy nosed it is probably because Sinn Fein had a confused position on paying the unpopular water taxes, versus the straightforward Socialist mantra of “tear up your application form and we’ll go all the way to court with you.”
This will probably see a swing further to political instability as we approach the next election. The Socialists are selling a popular message and the likes of Sinn Fein and various independents will probably up their rhetoric on the topic over the next year.
These people, if they get in a whiff of power, will probably ruin our recovery. They will ignore agreements with our lenders and implement policies that will kill our strong but not invulnerable economic growth. You may agree with them, but I note few Marxist paradises from which to draw inspiration that their policies will do well in government.
The government needs to take control of the Irish Water situation. They cannot treat Irish Water as Fianna Fáil did the HSE, as a convenient place to kick all awkward questions and place all blame for the ills of the world. The people simply won’t accept it.
Government needs to take the super quango by the head and firstly, shut their idiotic and chaotic PR and management machine up. We need sensible approaches to the practical problems people will face with Irish Water, and none of this “Oh, you probably heard us wrong when we said that thing,” such as they did over landlords.
The government needs to put in more provisions for hardship around Irish Water charges. It needs to make a show of guaranteeing that Irish Water will not be privatised – such as by signing a law to that effect, with a sunset clause in it, sometime the election after next. And government should make sure that the good that Irish Water does, in investing into infrastructure, is better advertised.
Otherwise this is the issue that the otherwise barking mad will use to run government from office and probably take power to run the country into the ground. All that over a stupid quango? Not worth it.
Aaron McKenna is a businessman and a columnist for TheJournal.ie. He is also involved in activism in his local area. You can find out more about him at aaronmckenna.com or follow him on Twitter @aaronmckenna. To read more columns by Aaron click here.
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