MAYBE the European Commission will force us to raise revenue to pay for water consumption; maybe it won't. It makes little difference. We should be controlling our water consumption by the normal process of pricing, whatever Europe decides, simply because we should pay for whatever we use particularly as the economy grows and we grow more aquatically spendthrift.
At the moment, who cares what happens if taps are left on? "Water is free, isn't it? Isn't more of the stuff going to fall from the skies anyway? Probably, though rainfall is a wildly difficult thing to make much sense of. In January this year rainfall in Dublin was only 15 per cent of normal. That looks serious. Put a bucket under the gutterdownpipe and flush after number two only. But then along comes February, and the Dublin rainfall was 154 per cent of normal - that is half as much again. Remove that bucket and stop panicking. And then along comes March and gives us 23 per cent of the normal rainfall for that month, and where the hell's that bloody bucket?
But in Malin Head in March, when in Dublin my daffodils were holding out begging bowls and pleading for water, the rainfall was twice what it normally is. And Mayo in February increased its rainfall by two and a half times with 10 inches of the stuff. A moment's silence, if you please, for poor sodden Mayo. Maybe our Another Life correspondent should be called Michael Soggy.
Variable Rainfall
What can we learn from this? Not much. Patterns are hard to diagnose in weather - ask Brendan McWilliams at the front of this newspaper and he'll give you a daily column on it for the next 200 years without even blinking. But there is this. W can never be sure what will happen next; and, of course, rain fallen isn't rain gathered. Malin Head, standing stoically in the rain, still needs piped water; and Dublin is in dire trouble if it rains 200 inches a year in the city, but not all in Wicklow.
Water is not merely difficult to gather, it is difficult to store - and extremely difficult to pipe. We have spent vast fortunes building dams in the Wicklow Mountains. That water is then treated and cleaned before it is piped to Dublin - at which point nearly half of it is lost through faulty pipes even before it arrives in our heedless homes, where we have left the taps on.
According to Dublin Corporation, Dublin city never has excess water. We live a few hundred feet beneath and 10 miles from these lofty puddles which are renewed as they empty; and there is no penalty for emptying them frivolously, as there is for leaving on the electric light or the gas burning central heating with the windows open. There should be.
Taxpayers' money built the water systems of Ireland, and it is wicked to waste public money, as it is wicked to waste water. Only those who cling to the dreary and rusting hulk of obsolete socialist ideology could seriously maintain that there is such a thing as "free" water. It is not free; and every drop lost - through the taps or the pipes is another penny gone from the public exchequer.
The only piped water which should be wasted without financial cost to the waster is their own personal allocation - for no civilised society would make the poor poorer merely for keeping clean. But after a certain (generous) allowance it must be time to reach for the cheque book for every drop we use.
Precarious Balance
None of the foregoing is in any way contentious. Two seconds of modest thought will tell us that even in a normal year our water consumption is too close to our supplies for us to be easy about the balance. To hear Dick Spring assure us airily that in this regard we do things differently from our European partners - who all have water charges - is like pooh poohing our fellow Europeans over the issue of gravity or the temperature of fire; we order these things differently in Ireland, you know - go away and mind your own business. We're perfectly well off here, thank you.
Well, we were, apparently, perfectly well off in Ireland without sex until the Late Late Show introduced it to us. The same laws that apply to sex and water in France apply to sex and water in Ireland, too. Most, of us seem reconciled to the notion of sex in our lives these days, distasteful though most of us no doubt find it. Might our politicians not acknowledge, that piped water costs money and must be paid for somehow or other; and that, if we are going to have water charges, they might as well be related to water use, or otherwise reckless waste of water will continue unpunished?
Political Gamesmanship
This is obvious, so obvious; yet what is not an issue in any real terms is being turned into an issue simply because one leader, Mary Harney, is prepared to state the obvious when it is time to do so. Not long ago, pusillanimity and political gamesmanship ensured that our moral legislation remained mired in devaleran obscurity until we were booted out of it by European laws.
Until Europe compelled us to move towards the inevitable, any politicians who spoke out on legislation which reflected the actual reality of Irish people's sexual habits stood guaranteed to be put to the sword by their political opponents, especially since our absurd multi seat constituencies are themselves a guarantee against political courage and enterprise.
Are our politicians determined to wait once more until they are booted into reality by Europe? And, in the meantime, will they persist in scoffing and ridiculing into oblivion any other politician who recognises that water is a difficult substance to move from your back garden tap to the rosebed, never mind from Poulaphouca to Phibsborough?
Government ministers now declare that there will not be water charges. Wrong. There will be. They will be levied internally and invisibly on the exchequer, but they will be levied - not least to pay the £32 million for repairing the leaking pipes of Dublin. Money spent on water will not be spent elsewhere. That is all.