The smile on the face of the Minister for the Environment, Noel Dempsey, turned slowly into a grimace in Galway this week when the dreaded "water charges" issue raised its ugly head.
The stunning backdrop of Lough Derg on a sun-filled February day had no doubt tempted the Minister to wax lyrical on Ireland's historical importance. When the barbarians overcame Europe, wasn't it in this country, he said, that much of the continent's cultural wealth found protection with the help of monks, many of whom hung out around the same lakeshore, before it was returned to Europe. Perhaps the EU should view the many millions it is sending to Ireland now as "repaying a very old debt". We already had the bulk of £185 million for water projects from Brussels but, please, now we needed the guts of £1.3 billion to meet the EU urban waste water directive.
Dempsey's novel approach to pushing the begging bowl at one of the EU's most influential moneybags, J.F. Verstrynge, director of the Cohesion Fund, may have gone down well with the dignitaries gathered in Killaloe, but the "faceless Brussels bureaucrat", as he called himself, showed a face with bite. In no uncertain terms, he spelt out Commission opposition to Ireland standing alone in Europe in having no service charges for household water. Indeed he could see a time when the EU would force us to reintroduce water charges.
The political nightmare came up at the press briefing. How, Dempsey was asked, could he reconcile Verstrynge's views and the pro-charges attitude of the PDs with those of Fianna Fail? He was articulating "Government policy", he said.
Then again, the Minister may not have been that surprised by the onslaught. It emerged that on his first day in office, the congratulatory letter from EU Commissioner Monika Wulf- Mathies, benefactor-in-chief when it comes to cohesion funds, included a line to the effect that the Commission was strongly opposed to the absence of water charges in Ireland.