So what is the story with Irish Water?

Last year the gubmint announced they were setting up a new company – Irish Water – to upgrade and maintain our water supply.

That on the face of it is a reasonable ambition, but why set up an whole new company?  Well, the gubmint let slip that it was at the demand of the EU, and that it was basically a means of removing a debt from the gubmint to a private firm.  This is a blatant spot of cooking the books, and is like a householder moving his mortgage to a separate account so that on the face of it his current account is now flush and he can spend what he likes.  A load of bollox in other words.

So why is the EU behind this bit of chicanery?  I'll come to that in a moment.

Anyhows, at the cost of around a billion Euro they set up Irish Water and started installing water meters.

I'll skip over the demands for private details, the breaches of the Data Protection Act, the dud computer systems and the other fiascoes resulting from the cack-handed handing of the company [mainly because they were too numerous to mention] and move on to the protests which took the gubmint completely off guard.  They needed everyone to sign up to this scheme so they started dropping their prices for the water charge.  When they realised only a few suckers were taken in by this gesture they then announced they would pay people to sign up.

So why would a gubmint spend over a billion setting up a company and then pay people to sign into it?

The current situation is that if I sign a contract with this company I will get a payment of €100, and my water bill will be fixed at €130 per annum [if you don’t have a septic tank, it’s €260] for the next two years.  This actually sounds very reasonable?

Let's look behind the figures.

It has been calculated that for Irish Water to break even after paying the interest on its debts, and the running of the company, the cost of collecting the payments, not to mention fixing some of the leaks in the system, it would have to charge a flat minimum of €1,000 a year. 

So from 2017 onwards, my bill will have to be a minimum of €1,000 per annum.  Bear in mind that I am already paying for my water through VAT and Car Tax [yes – seriously!].

We then have a situation where an entire country has signed up to pay €1,000 and more per year with no cap on the amount that can be charged, to a private company.  Wouldn't you love to own that company?  And this is where the EU comes in.  They are pushing for the privatisation of utility companies across Europe, and this is their plan for Irish Water.

Once Irish Water is sold off to some foreign conglomerate then of course profits have to be added into the equation and God only knows how high the charges will go, but it will be well in excess of the paltry €1,000 per annum.

The gubmint are getting desperate now.  Their gestures of gifts and reduced prices haven't worked and the protests continue.  They are now forsaking the carrot for the stick.  They are talking of allowing a private company have access to my pension to draw off whatever they think they need.

This is going way beyond theft.  This opens so many floodgates that just don't bear thinking about. 

Most of the time our gubmint is evil.

But this goes way beyond evil.