The squeaky wheel gets the grease, or perhaps in the case of Uisce Éireann the dripping tap gets the €12 billion spanner.
For months, the utility has been decrying its lack of funds at every opportunity in a concerted and coordinated fashion to ensure the Government and the public could be in no doubt that unless pipes went into the ground there would be no more homes.
In March the utility’s chairman Jerry Grant told a Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland conference that the State’s water and sewerage systems were in “a desperate state” because of “extraordinary complacency” and “passive indifference” to investment in infrastructure.
The goal of building 50,000 homes on average each year could not be met unless there was a “new approach from the Government” in developing water services, Grant said,
RM Block
The utility has to be commended for taking this forthright approach. After all, the strategy worked. A hefty chunk has been allocated to Uisce Éireann under the National Development Plan – €2 billion in equity funding, another €2.5 billion for new large-scale projects, and €7.6 billion to improve water services.
The establishment of Irish Water was predicated on a model where, like other utility providers such as electricity and gas companies, user charges would provide its core funding. When in 2016 household charges were suspended and subsequently scrapped, the utility was left – so to speak – high and dry, largely reliant on the annual State budget which mitigated against long-term planning.
Finally, the Government appears to be realising that certainty is funding is needed for these vital infrastructural investments, rather than State organisations having to wait to see what emerges in each budget. Private sector infrastructure investors in national projects need similar reassurance. Ministers now recognise the need to guarantee a flow of funding over a long period of years. Whether they can deliver on this if the budget numbers get tight is, of course, the big question.
