Will water charges once again be levied on households, this time by the country’s Fianna Fail – led coalition government? Water taxes are seen by the country’s political establishment as one way to plug the forecasted shortfall in tax revenue resulting from the inevitable collapse of the country’s decade-long falsified residential property price scam.
It was a Fne Gael- Labour coalition government (back in the 1980’s) that first legislated for the introduction of domestic water charges as a means of funding local authorities. A Labour Party Mayor of Drogheda (the late Peter Moore) infamously used his casting vote to ensure water charges would continue in the town after a successful “no-pay” campaign forced a number of elected Drogheda Corporation members to think again,
resulting in a deadlocked council chamber. Peter Moore was not the only enthusiastic supporter of the water tax in Drogheda at the time. Cllr. Fergus O’Dowd (now a T.D.), at a public meeting of residents organisations in the local Community Services Centre, slammed the leadership of the ITGWU (now Siptu) and the ATGWU (now Unite) in Drogheda as “irresponsible” for openly backing the “no pay” anti-water charges campaign. Fergus argued strenously that water taxes were “vitally necessary” to fund the running of the town and even threatned those present at the meeting to pay up or there would be wholesale council staff redundancies.
On last Sunday night’s (July 6th) “The Week in Politics” programme on RTE 1 television, a less than convincing Fianna Fail Minister for Education Mary Hanafin denied water charges were being contemplated whilst a spokesperson for the Chambers of Commerce of Ireland (on the same programme) opined that “domestic water charges are now inevitable”.
It was on the back of the “no-pay” anti-water charges campaign in Dublin that Socialist party leader Joe Higgins was first elected to Dail Eireann, a result that “frightened the life” out of Ireland’s political establishment. Fearful that Joe Higgins and the genuine political left were on the verge of an electoral breakthrough, the leader of now defunct Democratic Left (DL) party, Proinsias de Rossa, eventually “rolled up his sleeves and got off his political backside” to demand the abolition of water charges from an embittered Fine Gael and Labour as the price for his participation in government with them. His vindictive coalition partners then retalliated by ensuring that de Rossa, as Social Welfare Minister, was cash-starved and unable to deliver real (above-inflation) increases for pensioners in the subsequent Budget
Having witnessed first hand (as an activist in the anti-water tax campaign in Drogheda in the 1980s) Fine Gael’s Fergus O’Dowd’s fanatical and absolute support for these taxes, I allowed myself a quiet, cynical, smile when the Fine Gael spokesperson on the programme last Sunday night declared that – “we are opposed to water charges”.
