COMMENT: Watered-down charges simply won’t wash

RTÉ’s plans to shut down its in-house children’s television production department has caused considerable consternation. However, if some of the State broadcaster’s most-loved puppets find themselves out of work next year, there may be a new role for them in Government 

Personally, I’d have more faith in Bosco running the country. He/she (I was never sure, to be honest) would probably have done a better job in dealing with the water charges fiasco than some of our sitting TDs and ministers.

I almost felt sorry for Simon Coveney as he was filleted by Pat Kenny on Newstalk last week, when the Irish Water saga drifted further into the twilight zone. 

At first, the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government had been doing a reasonable job trying to dissolve the latest water controversy, strongly denying that the new report was simply a fudge that would spare the Government’s blushes if it rowed back on charges. 

This is the gist of it: water will be paid for out of general taxation. The Government will effectively become Irish Water’s largest customer, but those who waste our precious natural resource will have to pay.

 No household will be billed for ‘normal’ use and, of course, there will be further exemptions in place for those with certain medical conditions or other special circumstances.

It all sounds to me like a watered-down version of the original plan, albeit with more generous usage allowances. Same, same but different.

During his Newstalk interview, an embattled Simon Coveney was really feeling the heat as Pat Kenny raised the thorny issue of what would happen to those who had already paid their water charges. Incredibly, the minister ventured that some sort of mechanism would have to be found to pursue those who hadn’t paid the original water bills. This, he stressed, was the Fine Gael position.

In order for this to happen, the Government would have to face down the thousands of people who had marched on the streets in defiance of water charges; the very same people who voted out Fine Gael and Labour TDs throughout the country in the 2016 General Election bloodbath. 

In my view, it would be far more sensible for the State to refund those who have already paid through the issuing of increased tax credits over a number of years. 

Simon Coveney was probably just being honest when he pulled the pin out of the latest water charges grenade. But the political consequence of retrospectively pursuing defaulters for what is now a discredited billing system simply doesn’t bear thinking about.