Irish Water Colour of Hall Door Needed To Get Right Water Bill

April 4, 2015

Customers of Irish Water are being asked to tell the utility the colour of their front door and provide details of their neighbours’ property in a bid to get the right bills to the right people.
Irish Water has admitted it is seeking help in matching some of its water meters to the right house on their datatbase due to the high number of properties here with similar addresses.

The company said that it is working to match some 50,000 meters to the right home after it emerged that a customer was asked to identify the colour of her front door and gate in an attempt to help Irish Water establish which meter was linked to her house.

“Around 40% of Irish addresses are non-unique,” Elizabeth Arnett, head of communications at Irish Water, said.
“These are predominantly in rural Ireland where people give their townland as their address, but in some towns some addresses could be given as ‘Main Street’ for example,” she said.
Ms Arnett said having put in some 500,000 meters, the utility found that 40% of the addresses are non-unique and that Irish Water is working on establishing the correct house for 10% of these.

Elizabeth Arnett Irish Water spokesperson

By way of example, Ms Arnett said that the utility found two people with the same name and date of birth living in adjacent houses in the same rural location. Both only gave the townland as their home address.
The issue arose after one rural-based Irish Water customer contacted the company to enquire as to how they were certain that the correct meter was linked to their home.
“Each Irish Water meter installed at the outside stop valve has an individual number which is linked to the property it is attached to.
“When you registered your property you also receive an application number which identifies your property. However, as your address is what we call a ‘non-unique address’, meaning that one or more other properties in your area share the same address. This means that we are unable to pinpoint your property on our system,” the email from the company read.

The Irish Water representative then went on to ask that the customer supply identifying features such as:

The colour of the property.
The colour of the door.
Details about their neighbours’ properties.
The colour of the gate.
The side of the road the property is on and for
any directions from nearest town or landmark.

Meanwhile, the CSO has “provisionally” placed Irish Water on the Government’s balance sheet, in a further sign of uncertainty over whether it will pass EU financial tests or if it can be considered an off-the-books company.
Irish Water can only be classed as a private firm — meaning the full €500m cost will not fall on the exchequer — if it passes strict Eurostat financial tests in May, which were originally due to take place this month.
However, these tests are solely dependent on whether the body can prove the majority of its funding comes from non-state, private income — a key reason for the Government’s recent increased push for people to pay water charges.
The CSO report stressed the move to place Irish Water on the balance sheet is preliminary, while a Government spokesperson said the Coalition remains “absolutely confident” it will pass the financial tests.
However, People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett said it is ludicrous to think this will be the case.

Irish Examiner Saturday April 4th 2015

Government And Media Launch Major Propaganda Campaign Against Water Protesters

April 3, 2015

Yesterday, the Government in cooperation with its many friends in the media, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Irish Water, launched its first major propaganda campaign of 2015 aimed at defeating those who are refusing to pay water charges.

The message was simple: The water is poisoned, the infrastructure is about to collapse any minute with dire consequences for ‘customers’. The only thing that will prevent the greatest catastrophe since the famine is – investment, lots and lots of investment.

One million homes at significant risk from contaminated drinking water screamed the Irish Independent headline. And just in case readers didn’t get the fear message, there’s apicture of two lovely children brushing their teeth, great to get the emotions going.

Other dire warnings included: health risk to babies, e-coli, cryptosporidium, lead poisoning, endless water notices, risk to thousands of jobs.
‘Customers’ were warned that if they wanted a modern water system they would have to pay for it. €500 million per year for ten years – minimum.

John Tierney  Irish Water Director — John Tierney Irish Water Director

Also in the Independent (partly owned by Denis O’Brien) John Tierney, Managing Director of Irish Water, was afforded an article all of his own in which he made this dire revelation:
There are now people in Ireland who cannot drink their water because it will make them ill. His solution: Slap a bill for €2.3 billion on ‘customers’ to pay up or risk getting sick. We want to become an organisation trusted by people to deliver every time they turn on their tap.
What he means is, of course – trusted to deliver a bill every time a ‘customer’ turns on a tap?

Ivan Yates Chris Donaghue Newstalk Breakfast

To be fair to Newstalk’s (fully owned by Denis O’Brien) Breakfast presenters, Ivan Yates and Chris Donoghue, they didn’t even bother with balance.
They got stuck in right away – 20,000 on boiled water notices, nearly one million at risk. They interviewed a spokesperson from EPA asking him comfortable, leading questions that were very helpful to Irish Water.
Again we had all the dire warnings that the sky was about to fall in unless Irish Water ‘customers’ stumped up a couple of billion. At the end of the piece, in case ‘customers’ still weren’t on song, Ivan Yates hammered home the message:
There’s no avoiding the fact if we want to retain our water quality for
almost a million people very significant investment needs to take place.

RTE also played its part in the Government’s propaganda campaign. Here’s part of the written introduction on the Sean O’Rourke website to an interview with Head of Asset Management at Irish Water Jerry Grant.
In the face of opposition to water charges, the response from government and from Irish Water has remained steady. If we want to ensure a sustainable and clean supply of water into the future, charging for water is the way forward.
In fairness to RTE, this clear and dramatic abandonment of balance in favour of supporting Government policy is courageous. At least listeners now know where the national broadcaster stands on the question of water tax.
On RTE’s Late Debate presenter Cormac O’hEadhra nearly had a heart attack at the sheer horror of what was revealed in the EPA report.

Donegal Now 20th January 2015

Eight parts of Donegal had traces of a potentially harmful substance in their water supplies in 2013, according to the latest report from the Environmental Protection Agency.

It has found that the supplies contain excess levels of “trihalomethanes” which occur when naturally-occurring organic and inorganic materials in the water react with disinfectants put into the supplies, like chlorine and chloramine.
Some people who drink water containing total trihalomethanes in excess of the acceptable limits over many years could experience liver, kidney, or central nervous system problems and an increased risk of cancer.
According to the EPA, “Trihalomethanes, a by-product of the chlorination (disinfection) process, are undesirable in drinking water and their presence should be minimised while not compromising disinfection.”
Donegal Co. Council was notified by the EPA and directed to take action. The areas concerned were: Letterkenny Public Water Supply,Fintown, Cashelard (Ballyshannon), Ballyshannon, Gortahork/Falcarragh, Greencastle, Rathmullan Public Water Supply, Portnoo/Narin

Directives to take action were issued in 2011 but by the end of 2013 only Ballyshannon PWS had complied. But last year the EPA initiated prosecutions in relation to the Letterkenny Public Water Supply.
The comprehensive report, a copy of which has been seen by Donegal Now, also highlights how many private wells are at risk from contamination. The report also shows that there are 33 areas in Donegal where water supplies require remedial action.

Funny, all this hysteria, because Irish citizens (as opposed to customers) have been aware for decades that the water system is Third World standard, at best.

They know they’re being poisoned, they know political incompetence and corruption is at the root of the problem, they know major investment is required.

They also know, and this is where they depart from the position of the Government and its friends in the media, that this time they are not going to be screwed because of the greed and corruption of politicians.

Originally posted in Public Inquiry by Anthony 21 January 2015
Edited by Buncrana Together 28th March

The Water Charges Fiasco A Lesson In How Not To Do Things

April 1, 2015

Social enterprise, civil disobedience and a more accountable political system could help Ireland work better. But for starters, let’s learn some lessons from the water-charge shambles

First published Sat, Dec 13 2014

A year ago, The Irish Times published the first Blueprint for a Smarter Society.
Here, we revisit that idea, asking writers to imagine a future of “engaged citizens in a smart society and not just alienated workers in a smart economy”.

Three years ago a young Norwegian postgraduate in Florence examined how three small countries had been coping over the previous 10 to 20 years with the global crisis, globalisation, Europeanisation and so on. After interviewing a host of ministers and civil servants, policymakers and central bankers in New Zealand, Norway and Ireland, he found that Ireland had come bottom of the pile. Why had we done so badly ? The short answer, he said, was that if we had had Norway or New Zealand’s minister for finance we wouldn’t have ended up where we were.

“That was fairly shaming for an Irish person to hear,” said Peter Mair, the Irish head of politics at the European University Institute in Florence, where the young Norwegian delivered his seminar.

Mair included the story in his address to the 2011 Magill Summer School, only a few months after the change of government and just two weeks before his own sudden death. He used it to ask the one question guaranteed to propel an already frightened, seething nation on to a higher plane of rage.

“If the ministers matter so much, or the poor quality of the ministerial government matters so much, why don’t we already have this government and this political infrastructure, which can govern us better and which New Zealand has, Norway has, the Netherlands has, Denmark has and a number of countries have? . . . Why haven’t we built up a system of government which suits our needs, which can look after us well and which doesn’t neglect us, as it has done up to now?”

His analysis spared no one. The defence of being a “new” country doesn’t wash; we have had democracy longer and in a more sustained fashion than almost any other country in Europe. We are the also best-represented voters in Europe.

So whose fault was it ? “We, the citizens, did this,” he said.

We have never respected the State. We see it as something to be dodged, ripped off, milked for personal, local, constituency benefit. Mair called it amoral localism. We lost sight of the broader collective interest a long time ago.

And here’s the really wounding part. We were well able to control our TDs using fear and reward – ably abetted by the multiseat-constituency system – but never bothered to control our governments. “As citizens we never held our governments accountable for their policies,” Mair said. “We were too busy holding our TDs accountable for their local activities.”

In a drinking game about the language around Ireland’s path to penury, that word “accountable” would account for a lot of indignant drunks. But what Mair did was to turn the word back on ourselves.

Accountability begins with us, the citizens. If we aspire to being a mature democracy, never mind a smarter country, we have to begin by recognising the root of our problems. This is about something more profound than harnessing protests against unpopular taxes.

It is about getting to the truth of why so many of our ministers were not up to the job, yet survived and prospered. It is about why the Civil Service, despite the presence of some of the brightest, most diligent people in the country, continues to leave the average citizen feeling excluded, disrespected and disempowered, and is perceived to be grounded in a different culture.

It is about how and why we, the citizens, made bad choices.

Asked to name the main problems inherent in our political system, Dr Jane Suiter, a political scientist at Dublin City University, lists five: cronyism, governing for vested interests, a lack of accountability, a lack of openness and transparency, and an absence of challenging voices. They amount to a template for the birth of Irish Water.

In one sense the stunning ineptness of Irish Water has been a gift to us, the citizens: an accessible, textbook study of how an unaccountable Government and Civil Service can unite to patronise and insult us.

All in one quango

Eddie Molloy, a management consultant who began his working life at Guinness when he was 14, names the links.

"With Irish Water we had the whole works: legislation rammed through the Dáil, a deal done behind closed doors with the unions to give people contracts out to 2026, no redundancies, a licence to hire, people exiting one job with a golden handshake then joining up again with Irish Water, cronyism on the board.”

Why has the Department of the Environment in particular, the one responsible for Irish Water, thrown up such vast and continuing problems, he asks. An awestruck county manager told him: “The way that deal was done . . . you could not make it up, Eddie, you just could not make it up.”

Molloy traces the roots of Irish Water and virtually every other State-conceived fiasco to that word “accountability” and, in particular, to “the crucial pivot around which problems revolve”: the relationship between a government minister and his or her secretary general.

As the responsibilities of both are conflated in the relevant 90-year-old Act, the minister can swat away criticism by declaring that he or she “was acting on the best advice”, affecting a pained aura while dropping officials in the slurry – officials who are precluded under law from saying what that advice was.

“So there is no accountability,” Molloy says, “and both can collude in their own mutual interest. As Brendan Howlin put it, ‘Go along to get along.’ Where do so many secretaries general go when they’ve completed their seven-year contracts? To some other job* the government has in its gift.” Going along to get along.

Just before entering government Pat Rabbitte gave a notably hard-hitting speech about it: “Without statutory reform, the system of accountability we pretend to operate in this country is grounded in a lie . . . Civil servants can hide behind the skirts of ministers, and ministers can avoid responsibility.”

“And it remains grounded in a lie,” Molloy says now. “When you have that, you have a real problem. Civil servants sat across the table with managers and union officials and cut that deal. Was Phil Hogan responsible, or was it the secretary general? Just what are the secretaries general of Health and Environment personally accountable for?”

Cracking accountability

Dr Tracey Cooper, an outsider brought in from the UK to head the Health Information and Quality Authority, remarked in her parting words: “We still have not cracked accountability in the health service when things go wrong. The problem is we have never had any consequences. If there’s a repeated failure, nothing really happens.”

The nature of the questions still swirling around Irish Water demonstrates how closed the process is to the citizen. Why are we unable to apportion responsibility for the shambles? Who were the officials who negotiated the deal? Without grown-up answers, how can we know it won’t happen again?

For many the most dismaying aspect of the Irish Water shambles was the inability of those at the centre to spot the glaring danger signs. “That’s because they live in that cultural soup of complacency, keeping industrial peace and so on to themselves. A fish does not recognise the water it swims in,” says Molloy. “The people sitting in the room are talking to themselves. The citizen is not represented. When doing these things, the government loses sight of the fact that it’s not just acting as an employer – which it is – but it is also the government of all of us.

“With every single institutional failure in Ireland – the church, Fás, AIB, the prison service, the penalty points, the child-protection system – you would look to the culture construct to explain what went wrong. Mindset can defeat everything.”

Jane Suiter’s solutions touch repeatedly on the issue of transparency – around appointments and lobbying, for example. Like Molloy, she suggests naming and allocating clear lines of responsibility between senior ministers and civil servants.

She also suggests a review of the widespread use of the Official Secrets Act. “We should be making new recruits sign a pledge to put citizen and public interest centre stage, not secrecy. We are no longer a State under imminent violent threat.”

The concept of putting the public interest at the heart of its values seems blindingly obvious to outsiders, yet it’s a matter of legal and philosophical debate in some circles. Such as, what do you do if you have to choose between the public interest and making the minister look good?

The civil servant paper

Among the several papers produced on Civil Service accountability over the years, Molloy singles out for special admiration one called Strengthening Civil Service Accountability, produced by civil servants themselves. “It defined accountability as being subject to external scrutiny, with a requirement to explain, justify . . . with implications of consequences.”

Then, he says, an expert panel was set up to take the paper to public consultation, “and the mice got at it”. His weary description of boards and panels stuffed with the very people who go along to get along doesn’t make for happy listening.

It’s important to record that Molloy has hope, although civil servants may be astonished to hear that the repository of his hope lies in them. “I have huge regard for the Civil Service. The public has no idea of all the things they do. But, God, they’re in a system which almost abuses the human talent they were given.

“Politicians won’t go for meaningful reform, because that would be like turkeys voting for Christmas. So civil servants are the only people positioned to do it, because they have a degree of job security and tenure and good salaries and pensions, and have the essential intelligence and resources to do it.”

He urges them to read and take courage from Anne Chambers’s new biography of TK Whitaker and “realise that it is in the public interest and their interest to develop an identity as the Fifth Estate”.

Among Suiter’s proposals are several that aim to place the citizen at centre stage, resulting, by definition, in accountability at every level. “Perhaps we even need to be really radical and consider a randomly recruited citizen council, replaced annually. Or at least citizenproof all decisions explicitly, as in a citizen impact report.”

Arguing among other things for a Dáil strengthened with committee work and the election by secret ballot of the ceann comhairle – “so his loyalty is to colleagues, not the taoiseach who appointed him” – Suiter begins to sound a bit disheartened.

“As we saw in the few questions that were asked at the debate on the establishment of Irish Water, politicians are more likely to ask questions about local politics and their influence rather than really getting to grips with the big issues.”

And so we come full circle to the late Peter Mair.

“We the people need to think about who we are electing and why,” Suiter says. “If we elect people who we think will deliver to us locally, then how can we expect everyone in every other constituency not to do the same? What comes first, parish or country? We’re very good at the former, not so much at the latter.”

We know from at least one Irish Times poll that the electorate is ignorant of the most basic facts about the functioning of our democracy. So the smartest step we could take, surely, is to educate ourselves.

When Suiter was travelling the country with We the Citizens, an initiative to test the idea of a citizens’ assembly, it was what most people wanted: “real citizenship education, not the current Junior Cert but something much wider and more philosophical, perhaps even in primary school. This will be really crucial for everyone to understand how politics works and why.”

But, first, is anyone in public life brave enough to trust citizens with the truth?

* This article was edited on February 26th, 2015

The Irish Times article here