An Irish woman’s social, political and domestic commentary
Good Day: A nice bottle of wine bought in Tesco was corked 
But M rang them up (in the face of deep cynicism from me) and they swapped it – no problem! It’s policy.
Bad Day: I polished the mirror. Or tried to. Can’t get rid of the streaks. Sigh.
IT puzzles me how Fianna Fail has acquired its reputation for sound management and efficient administration. Every week that passes all I see is a combination of old-fashioned stroke pulling and bumbling idiocy.
The fiasco over schools paying water charges is a perfect example of how the government’s bad planning, devotion to empty rhetoric and instinctive cute hoorism is prone to blow up in their faces. It’s such a mess that even the self-righteous assurance of technocrat education minister Mary Hanafin has been pierced.
The story begins in 1978 when Fianna Fail honoured an election promise and abolished domestic rates. Honourable mention is due to Brendan Howlin, who as environment minister in the rainbow coalition of the mid-1990s, prevented local authorities from introducing water charges.
The current debacle, however, began in 2000 when the government pulled off what it imagined to be a triumph – negotiating a get-out clause in the EU’s water framework directive. This wasn’t just another boring directive from the bureaucratic EU. It actually had the potential to solve Ireland’s water supply problems.
Remember cryptospiridium? All those people last summer and in previous years being warned by local authorities to boil their water? This poisoning of the supply happens because Ireland’s water-management system is such a mess. Our inland waterways are polluted – killing fish and making people sick. We’re running out of water in Dublin – either clean or dirty. Local authorities are spending a fortune trying (and failing) to provide clean water for everyone.
Other EU states face similar problems, so their governments came up with a joint water policy. Its aim was to protect supplies, eliminate dirty water, and convince citizens to become players in the day-to-day battle to provide everyone with sufficient amounts of safe water. If you weren’t in one of those areas on boil notices last year, just try and imagine how you’d have managed washing and cooking with contaminated water. The Water Framework Directive tried to save us from that.
Key to this was the introduction of water charges. As we’ve learned from plastic bags and rubbish-collection charges, no-one gets serious about environmental issues until money is involved. Clean water is scarce and expensive, but until people are charged for what they use, householders will continue to wash the car with hosepipes, ignore leaky pipes, leave taps running, flush the loo every five minutes, and generally waste thousands of gallons of valuable water each year.
Recognising this, the directive proposed that water users pay a charge which reflected the cost of getting the water from the lake and into their home or business. Send them the bills, watch their water usage plummet, and use the money you raise to clean up water supplies. Pricing worked for plastic bags and rubbish collection, and it would work for water.
The Irish public would go nuts, naturally. “This is a wet country,” they would moan. “Why should we have to pay for water?” Think of the phone calls to LiveLine, the mileage Joe Higgins would get out of it. Well, let him. Charging for water is the right thing to do, morally and practically. We gave a lead to Europe on the plastic-bag charge and the abolition of smoking in public places. People moaned, but with a modicum of leadership and political resolve the changes were made and now everyone is delighted. Even the smokers who get to flirt with each other outside pubs seem happy.
That’s what we needed on water charges, but we didn’t get it. Instead the government negotiated a derogation for domestic supplies on the basis that existing practice was to exempt ordinary users from water charges.
Had there been a poll in Galway last summer, I’m sure people would have voted for clean water over free water. But now the deed is done. We may have to hold our breaths so we don’t get sick while enjoying a power shower but hey, it’s free, so let’s keep some perspective.
Schools, like businesses, had never stopped paying local authority charges including water bills, and therefore couldn’t avail of the exemption allowed in the directive. But since these bills were a flat fee, they were manageable.
The introduction of metering changed that. Once the bills arrived, school managers realised how much water they were wasting through ignorance and leaky pipes. Some decided to cut down on their usage. But of course they needed money to pay the bills in the meantime, and to repair the plumbing. And so another Fianna Fail policy chicken came home to roost. The funding of Irish schools, in particular primary schools, is one of the greatest outrages of this country. Primaries receive only two-thirds of their funding from the state and have to raise the rest themselves. If you’re a middle-class parent in a leafy suburb, this isn’t a problem. The school has jumble sales and sponsored walks, and there’s enough to pay the ESB bill and buy a few computers.
If you live in a poor area where a request to parents for a “voluntary contribution” is a significant and unpayable burden, then your school can forget about the extras and will struggle to pay the basics. This suits the well-off to a T: their money pays for their school and they don’t even have to pay any nasty taxes to keep the poorer places going. Is it any wonder that Hanafin topped the poll in cushy Dun Laoghaire? The current funding system suits them just fine in Blackrock and Dalkey.
Some schools are well managed and paid their water bills. Others couldn’t, and as their arrears mounted the proverbial hit the fan. As the negotiations got under way last week, politics and ideology clashed. Hanafin would probably have preferred to exempt schools altogether but can’t under the terms of the directive. Her other preferred option was to give schools a “water allowance” and effectively pay the bills for them. The Department of the Environment wouldn’t agree to that, since it would undermine the whole purpose of the EU directive by removing the schools’ incentive to reduce bills.
If Fianna Fail ministers had thought about this in 2000 when they signed up to the directive, they might have installed water meters in schools straight away. This would have given principals a chance to see how much water they were using, and to make the repairs needed in good time. Instead, no-one did anything and now there are piles of unpaid bills and no money to meet them.
An unsatisfactory compromise has now been reached. Since the directive doesn’t have to be enforced until 2010, the schools will pay the old flat rate until then, a fine reward for those who paid their metered bills on time. In the meantime, Irish people will remain oblivious to both the cost of the water they merrily flush away, and the price that children in poor schools pay for low taxes.
Update: hey just read PO’Neill over at Irish Election. We are in perfect agreement 
My mother drove herself demented trying to stop us watching telly. Sad to say that Dallas provided a rare example of TV bringing harmony to the house. The Saturday night ritual of the family sitting down to watch the stupendous soap was followed by her occasional attempts to say the rosary. My memory, whether it can be trusted or not, is of us laughing and shrieking our way through Dallas while the rosary tended to break up in a row.
She was a rarity in those days : a working mother and nothing could be more certain to inflame her than returning to the house after her day to find a bunch of lazy, useless offspring slouched in front of the box. I look back and think; we only had RTE1 and RTE 2. What were we watching? Bosco? She made a few valiant efforts to break us but I think we broke her. She confiscated the aerial but we improvised and stuck a wire hanger in the back of the telly. Then she cut off the plug but we just put the wires straight into socket. She resorted to locking the set into her en suite. A mere lock wasn’t going to stop us and we diligently searched for a spare key and triumphantly retrieved it. Of course, we were always caught since she just felt the set and its warmth gave us away. Finally the day came when she struggled out to the car carrying the telly and went off to work with it in the boot. That one foiled us, so technically she won, but since we were convinced she was completely insane I fear she really lost.
Of course, on becoming a mother these desperate struggles of a parent to influence their children acquire a new perspective. She was trying to make us better people, but was it worth it? Which was more destructive : our devotion to television or the war conducted over it? And did it any of it ultimately matter? There were five children in our family and each one of us have turned out ostensibly successful if carrying our own little bag of unique neuroses and habits, some good, some bad. Would more or less telly have made a difference? Perhaps it was to our benefit but would it have made her happier if she’d learned to ignore the tv watching? Or has she the satisfaction of looking back now, confident that though it went unappreciated at the time, she was right.
Parenting has become both religion and science and every day produces a new bunch of supposed discoveries that assure us that whatever we’re doing with our children is wrong and will have dire consequences for them when they grow up. Their main effect is to alert me to the existence of a problem about which I had been blissfully unaware. Some new food crisis, the dangers of too much discipline, the threat of not enough, an obscure health problem or the crushing of the all-important self-esteem.
My biggest fear is that my boys won’t cough up for the nursing home charges as they’ll be too busy blaming me for their problems.
Among the armageddon like scenarios predicted by parenting experts is that children who watch too much television will turn into twitching, illiterate, isolated zombies with attention deficit disorder.
This is a bit of a problem for me since despite the best aspirations I’ve ended up actively encouraging my two boys to watch the box : they’re doing a good three hours a day in front of it. When the surveys come out, I search for evidence that this isn’t so very bad but can’t find much consolation. We have one television and its not hanging over the mantelpiece. Other than that, it appears their viewing habits are just the sort of thing to send the experts into paroxysms of concern.
I’m tired of worring and fretting though. So I’ve decided to do what my mother might have been better off doing : give up.
I’m uncivilised before 9am and the only way I’ve survived is thanks to the gift of early morning children’s television. I bring them down at 7am, turn onCeebeebies (no ads) and leave them supplies of toast and milk. Then I sneak back to bed and will myself back to sleep for another hour or until they get bored. There’s more telly intermittently during the day, after dinner and often during dinner. I know its bad but right now Postman Pat is a promise of fifteen minutes when I can do my jobs without having to answer to the persistent cries of Mammy, Mammy. The dye is cast so I’ve developed a defence against allegations that my methods will destroy them.
There are only a few truly definitive predictions one can make about childhood and its link to successful adulthood. Chief among these is the necessity to be born into money. Relative wealth dictates that the child is healthy, well educated, lives longer, stays out of prison and in employment. While it won’t ensure they’re happy, it’s a pretty good start. Since I had the great sense to be born middle class, marry middle-class and thus bear a child into middle class, it looks like I’ve already done the single most important thing to give my children a good shot at life. I’ve thrown in optional extras like breast-feeding and proximity to an extended family. At this stage I reckon everything else has marginal benefit and comes at the cost of exhausting my nerves. Every time I feel utterly useless as a mother I think about the rows over television and wonder what really matters.
What my mother also claimed and where the experts agree is that children are born with their inherited traits. After that the order in which they are born and the influence of their peers are the factors most influential on a child’s long term personality. I can’t help the order in which they were born though I can try to relieve the elder one of too much responsibility : the classic burden of the older child. I can force please and thank you’s upon them and teach them they are worth loving, but other than that I’m happy to accept my influence is limited and all the parenting techniques in the world don’t matter.
I have just two children and their personalities are completely opposed. One is instinctively generous, the other stashes his treats. One goes to bed perfectly every night, the other has to be chased around the house. I refuse to believe that over-exposure to Nick Junior can undermine or overcome any of these characteristics and thus affect their future happiness. On the other hand, choosing to let the telly issue slide might affect my current happiness. So my New Year’s resolution is to make myself happy and keep up the lie-ins but without the guilt. The funny thing is that some of the experts say that a happy mother will have happy children so maybe the wrong thing will turn out to be right in the end.
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