Brid Smith

The government suggests that the current water crisis was caused by wasteful householders running their water to prevent their pipes from freezing and irresponsibly not conserving water. However the authorities and engineers dealing with the water system have long flagged the perilous state of our infrastructure to the government, which they  have consistently ignored.

In the government’s pronouncements on the water crisis, we are seeing the same stunning hypocrisy that we saw with the banking and economic crisis. They want to shift the blame on to everyone and everything but themselves.

There are 2,700km of water mains in the city, 800km of which are more than 70 years old and need to be replaced. Since replacement got under way in 2006 less than 10% of the old water mains have been renewed. According to Dublin City Council, the levels of leakage in the city have been reduced from 43% in the late 1990s to 28% today through replacement programmes. However, all projects must be approved by the Department of the Environment and such approvals are being withheld due to the state of the public finances.

This lack of funding has led to serious doubts about the capacity of the water network to meet the needs of its population. The Dublin region is supplied with drinking water from one common network. The combined maximum output of the network is 540-550 million litres per day. Under normal circumstances, the average demand in the region is 530-540 million litres per day. This means the water plants serving Dublin operate at 96% capacity, or more, almost every day of the year, leaving supply and demand in Dublin “on a knife-edge”, with very little room for manoeuvre. Compare this to Paris, where the  three major treatment plants serving the city, each operate at about 50% capacity.

In the Budget last December, it was announced that a system of domestic water metering  would be introduced and that charges will be based on the amount consumed above a free allocation, on the grounds of water conservation. The argument is that our ‘free’ water does not encourage users to conserve supplies… that we are to blame for the wasting of water. Superficially the figures back this up. Daily domestic consumption per head is approximately 160 litres in Ireland. This compares to 150 litres in the UK where 25% of water users are metered, and 126 litres in Germany and 116 litres in Denmark where all water users are metered.

But there is no evidence that this lower consumption is a result of water of metering. The introduction of quotas, which provide for limited free water, will require an expensive national metering installation programme.

Michael Phillips, Dublin City Engineer, estimates that it would cost €110 million to put water meters in the city’s 216,000 houses or apartments. Even if the majority of homes could limit their usage to below quota levels the savings could be cancelled out by the cost of monitoring and administering the programme.

Instead the money spent in installations and monitoring of metering would be better directed to implement domestic water conservation measures. There are plenty of options. We don’t need drinking quality water to flush toilets or wash our clothes…and certainly not to wash cars or water gardens. There are proven systems for the collection of rainwater and grey water for functions that do not require water of drinking standard. Grey water is the wastewater produced from washing activities, between 50-80% of the total. Installation of dual flush toilets, which handle solid and liquid waste with different rates of flushing, would also make a huge difference. Furthermore, better insulation of homes would have meant those who left their taps running to stop their pipes freezing would not have felt obliged to do so. These are all major factors in the significantly reduced water usage in Germany and Denmark.

During the Celtic Tiger years thousands of new houses were built without such simple measures for water conservation as dual flush toilets and rainwater tanks being included. The Governement refused to take on Irish developers through building regulations to ensure that these measures in their developments.

Cllr Brid Smith said “Here again we see how the benefits of the Celtic Tiger were poured into the pockets of bankers, developers and wealthy elites, instead of being invested in  vital services and infrastructure. Ordinary people are left paying the price for the failure of Fianna Fail and the Green’s policies and their criminal squandering of the unprecedented wealth generated over that period. Fianna Fail and the Greens are now preaching that families must pay water charges to´help conserve water´.

The reintroduction of water charges as a new tax rather than paying them from general taxation would be an intolerable new burden on low and middle income households. Water charges were abolished in all three Dublin local Authorities in 1996 after a three year intensive campaign of boycott by taxpayers. The cost of water charges for ordinary people was hinted at when Minister Mary Hanafin said in 2008 that if domestic water rates in Ireland had remained in existence the cost to each household would now be €700 or €800 per annum.

The Government claim that the most vulnerable won’t have to pay. Similarly promises were made with regards to Bin charges introduced in 1991. However, in December’s budget the government removed this waiver leaving thousands of families liable to these charges.

And the long-term prospect, if charges are implemented, is privatisation. This is exactly what happened in England and Wales when Thatcher privatised the ten public regional water and sewerage companies. The promise was that the privatised companies would bring new investment and improve services. The experience was the direct opposite.  Tariffs increased by 46% in real terms during the first nine years, while profits by private companies increased by 142% in eight years. The number of households being disconnected tripled in the first 5 years which is a major public health concern. The Daily Mail, a staunch Tory Party supporter, ran a feature in 1994 ‘The Great Water Robbery’, which slated the companies on all counts: “ … the water industry has become the biggest rip-off in Britain. Water bills, both to households and industry, have soared. And the directors and shareholders of Britain’s top ten water companies have been able to use their position as monopoly suppliers to pull off the greatest act of licensed robbery in our history ”. We must prevent this from happening in Ireland. When we fought and defeated water charges in Dublin in the 1990’s we did so through people power. We need to unite together and stop this injustice from happening again to our community.