Householders will face water charges

[goosebump]

Fully agree with above. Metered usage is essential but could not be introduced overnight. This will happen anyway when the real cost of provision of water is calculated.

It wouldn't be that hard to install meters. Every house on a main supply has an accessible delivery pipe, and a scheme to install meters would provide a massive employment boost.

[birthday]

At the same time as installing water meters 'spray' taps could be installed on sinks along with WC water saving devices.
Domestic water demand may be significantly reduced by inroduction of 'pay for what you use' policy.
A reduction in demand may obviate the need to divert water from the Shannon to Dublin area or the requirement to build a de-salination plant.
The savings on capital expenditure that result from this would be substantial.

[keepitreal]

, and a scheme to install meters would provide a massive employment boost.

For how long? Until all the meters are installed? Then what about those jobs?

[goosebump]

For how long? Until all the meters are installed? Then what about those jobs?

I'm not aware of any plumber who would turn down on job on the basis that it wasn't going to last 20 years.

[soubresauts]

The fact that Gormley & co are willing to make people pay for poisoned water tells its own story. Deliberately poisoned water.

[ibis]

Part of the problem with these "green taxes", is that they are sold to the public on the basis of incentivisation to charne "abberant" behaviour, but then the Government/Local Authorities don't recognise the persons efforts afterwards.

For example, the people of Cashel were moved to a "pay by weight" waste collection scheme, to encourage them to recycle. However, in the first year, they recycled so much, that the council were making a loss on their waste collection, so upped the standing charge to recoup what they were losing on the pay by weight, completely undermining the incentive to recycle in the future.

That is exactly the kind of problem we face in Ireland - rapid decoupling of any kind of 'steering' tax from the effect it was supposed to have.

[bluefish]

If they want to tax me for water then they will have to do the following.

1. Provide me with water of enough dencent quality that is safe to Drink. (Had it tested, it failed well below safe drinikng levels. Council didnt care)
2. Get rid of the Brown colour to my water.
3. Provide me with mains waste disposal. otherwise I would expect to have a discount compared to those who have mains waste and mains water.

If they can provide all 3, I will pay for my water. I but bottle water at the moment, and that costs me over €10 euro per week, which is around €520 per year.

But if they cant provide me with the bare minimium of safe clean drinking water I will gladly go to Court for my unpaid bill.

And in the Spirit of Bogus Asylum seekers from Sligo, I will make the court cases drag on for years and eventually lead to the European Court of Human rights should I need too.


And for those champioing Wate Meters, Current charges for land owners are €500 for the install.

I lived in the UK for a few years, and I had a meter there.

My Average cost was £180 every qtr (3 Months). 10 years ago.

And that was for a couple.

Imagine having kids flushing the toilet every 5 minutes, or a burst pipe?

At the moment I have a valve thats leaking on my boiler outside, tried various plumbers, Friday is the earliest date.

So thats over 48 Hours of water pouring into my Garden that a meter will charge you for.

[Malbekh]

My take on water charges (some of which has been already posted)

Water charges are a good thing. In order to implement them fairly you're going to have to invest a lot of money in two areas. First, you'll have to install water meters in each household, second, you're going to have to give discounted options for people to collect 'grey water'. That is, storage drums to collect rainwater.

Right, now while you're implementing all these measures you might get some independent consultants to give you some benchmarking figures on water use. What this means is that for every household you have a formulae that calculates how much water they should be using based on size of family, age of family members and occupation (farming for example).

With me so far? Right, now we get to charge the general public public as follows. Each normal household get a 75% allowance of their predicted water use. Once you go over that you start paying a flat rate. Households that feature the unemployed, people with disabilities and pensioners (to mention a few) get a 125% allowance.

Start raking in the money. Now comes the new bit. As has been mentioned before, instead of chucking this money into general expenditure (where it will be wasted) you set this money aside transparently to deal with issues purely involving water infrastructure.

First we'll use the revenue to pay off the water meters and subsidies. After that, we'll use the water to upgrade the infrastructure so that everyone in Ireland has access to clean water (a right), and then we reduce the amount wasted by leaks to an acceptable minimum (I think it's 30% at the moment).

So, after maybe 10 years or longer we now have the best water infrastructure in Europe and have the following choices.

We can forego the water rates completely but rather cleverly we can set everyone's threshold at base 125% of nominal use as this prevents waste.

Or, we can continue to raise revenue except this time we can build a pipeline. A pipeline that takes our state of the art water into Europe. Specifically the southern European states like Italy, Spain etc.

And we sell it. Because as you all know, water is going to become a commodity very much like oil and gas are now as we continue into the 21st century.

What you do at this point is moot. From a personal perspective I would continue the pipeline into northern Africa, and offer African countries discounted water based on the profits you make from our European neighbours.

Waiting expectantly for the flawmongers...