Neglect of the water system is an all-Ireland issue, in the straightforward sense that both parts of Ireland have the same problem: long-term underinvestment is causing increasingly serious damage to the environment and the economy. Recent headlines in the Republic about the impact on house building could have been lifted from any Northern newspapers from the past five years.
Neglect is also an all-Ireland issue in the more complicated sense of involving cross-Border politicking.
In recent years this has mainly operated through Sinn Féin, as the only large all-Ireland party. It is opposed to domestic water charges and wants to present this as a consistent position, north and south. Circumstances are different either side of the Border, however, and require different approaches.
Sinn Féin has been in office at Stormont since 1999, with direct responsibility for water for half of the 16 years devolution has been operating. This has provided the party’s opponents with enough ammunition to accuse it of inconsistency. During the height of water protests in the Republic a decade ago, Sinn Féin found itself under attack from left and right, with its record at Stormont sometimes cited against it.
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As a result, what little pragmatism the party was once prepared to show on water has been replaced with a safety-first populism. It will not countenance anything that might look like a new tax or a household bill.
One example is Sinn Féin’s former policy to raise domestic rates, the standard property tax in Northern Ireland, while itemising how much is spent on water. This was the party’s big idea when devolution was restored after the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, but it has long since become unmentionable.
In reality, Sinn Féin should have little to fear from accusations of inconsistency as voters on each side of the border have little interest in politics on the other. But that is a rather awkward thing for republicans to admit, let alone to exploit.
The indifference is mutual and almost total. Sinn Féin has been flying a kite at Stormont over the past year to fund water through a levy on new housing development. The seriousness of this proposal is open to question – it may simply be another way to avoid discussing domestic charges. Nobody in the Republic seems to have noticed.
In Northern Ireland, people are oblivious to the constitutional referendum against water privatisation that Irish governments have been promising since 2016 (although this has disappeared from the latest programme for government). Privatisation is the spectre haunting the water funding debate across Ireland, yet it is a British issue and a redundant one at that.
No government wants to set up the next Thames Water and no private investor would buy it
It is often noted that Northern Ireland and the Republic are among the few places on earth without domestic water bills. Less noted is that England and Chile are the only places with fully privatised systems.
Chile’s is a legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship. England’s is a Thatcherite experiment that appeared to work for a while, but is now universally regarded as a fiasco. There was a time when the English model might have been imposed on Ireland, by London in the North and the Troika in the south. Any such danger has passed: no government wants to set up the next Thames Water and no private investor would buy it.
As the deadlocks on both sides of the border are connected, movement on one side might unlock the other.
Last week’s statement from Uisce Éireann about the “desperate state” of its system due to “extraordinary complacency” about investment has been rather helpful. For those paying attention in Northern Ireland, it debunks Stormont’s excuses about a unique problem that only money from London can fix.
More awareness of the proposed referendum in the Republic could also be useful. Northern Ireland needs the reassurance that the referendum is meant to provide that water privatisation and water charging are two separate issues.
This distinction was clearly understood in the years before the St Andrews Agreement, when British direct rule ministers set up a new government-owned water utility and attempted to introduce domestic charging. Their denials about preparing the system for sale were widely disbelieved. Most Stormont parties at the time said privatisation was their concern, but the public still needed to pay more for water. Sinn Féin and the DUP need to get back to this position before there is much hope of moving forward.
The Republic could gain a fresh perspective on its own debate by taking more interest in Stormont. The Northern executive has considered different approaches to the same problem, given its different circumstances. Although it may have ruled all of them out, at least it has given them some thought.
Sinn Féin’s limitations on the issue deserve to be put on the spot, but they also deserve more scrutiny than the hunt for a cheap jibe.
