Craic On

Irish Water

I see that with the advent of Irish Water, the company that no one wanted, there is talk of joint water metering. Joint Water metering is where people in apartments or adjoining houses have one meter and split the water bill.

It doesn’t matter if one person uses a lot of water and one uses little water, they both pay the same.

Dutch Girl

I remember when I worked for Honda Motors in Chiswick, London as an IT Projects Manager, that a girl from Holland came over to meet me and another guy who worked for me to discuss a Europe-wide project.

Her main topic of conversation when we took her out for lunch was the amount of water her next door neighbour was using which meant that she was getting an expensive water bill every quarter.

She said that he was doing machine washes several times a day and took baths where she took showers. She really was very annoyed at him and the unfairness of it all.

Your Neighbours

Now, think of your own next door neighbour. Most of you probably get on pretty well with him or her or them. Now just imagine that you started to get high water bills because they wer always out watering their plants using a hose and used a water sprinkler for the lawn.

All you ever used the water for was to drink, wash and cook with. They were probably going through maybe 10 times as much water as you are – and yet you shared the bill as it was one water meter.

You lived on your own and they had six children and a grandparent staying with them.

Opinion

What would be your opinion of your next door neighbours then when they were costing you a fortune?

Every time you saw the sprinkler come on in the garden of the house, or the hose, it would send you into a bad mood, feeling helpless as your joint water meter clicked on and on.

Might you have a word about all that water they were using and suggest that they paid more (which they would almost certainly refuse to do).

With joint water metering this would play out across the country and turn neighbours who used to get on well, against each other.

No Gumption

And this is all because our leaders wouldn’t stand up to the EU and the German banks and insist that the German banks paid for their own stupid commercial decisions to loan the likes of Anglo-Irish Bank money to give 120% mortgages to people who had shown no previous ability to be able to save money.

We were then loaned the money by the German banks, via the troika, to recompense them for the money they lost due to their own stupidity and poor commercial judgment – and they called it an Irish bailout when it was the German banks who were really bailed out, and the German people if they couldn’t pay.

If it wasn’t for this there would be no Irish water and no joint metering.