Talbot Street, Dublin this morning.
Mark writes:
“The We Won’t Pay campaign returned to Irish Water with a wheelie bin of water packs which were collected at demonstrations at the weekend, and set up a stall outside their head office giving out ‘charge free’ water….”
From top: Returned Irish Water mail; (from right): Anti Austerity Alliance candidate for Dublin South, Paul Murphy, Bernadette Rynne and Frank Donaghy; Catherine O’Neill and a ‘charge free’ cup of water.
(Mark Stedman/Photocall Ireland)
Earlier: Meterocracy Mouthpiece
Meanwhile…
Worried couple is worried.
Rob writes:
“The Indo ratcheting up the fear. Who needs a government press office?”
Register with Irish Water – or face crippling bill of €424(Aideen Sheehan, Independent.ie)
What will these people do when their water gets turned off?
It can not be turned. Why does no body check these things out. It states clearly on the Irish Water site that they.can not cut you off.
**turned off***
Wasn’t it they can reduce your water pressure to a trickle? So while they are not turning the water off, they make it extremely difficult for day to day use.
Some one should do this then take them to the ECHR
yes they should, wouldn’t get the result you’re after though
Sure, best not even try right? Best just give out online and then put up with it like always.
Ssheesh
I’m pretty sure the European Court of Human Rights is primarily aimed at people denied their rights through torture, oppression, state persecution, etc. and not for someone who doesn’t want to pay a utility bill.
@Just sayin’
Sure it does….
they cant reduce water to a trickle in a dwelling, only a business.
If they can reduce water to a trickle like they did when the reservoirs ran dry and burst water pipes were losing loads of water – then they do have means to cut your water supply. In our house the trickle meant no water at all.
There will be some people – I would take it quite a few who just can’t afford it.
What will they do? They could always start carrying buckets on their heads I suppose some in African do.
This piece in the Indo sums up why we have this charge in the first place pretty accurately to me:
“Bankers, speculators and politicians collapsed the exchequer revenue model – to use the jargon. Just to complicate things, the politicians funded a gift of – at a conservative estimate – €64bn to gamblers. Some of them in Ireland, more in the UK, France, Germany and the USA, to compensate the poor dears for their bad investment choices.Since then, there’s been a constant stream of “taxes” and “levies” and “charges” and increases of various kinds, to plug the hole the gamblers kicked in the economy “
we borrow a billion a month to run the country, most going to our generous welfare state which I am grateful for.
regardless of any bailout we need to spend less, a very good way of doing this is to stop paying for water through general taxation. we were almost unique in doing this.
smell
* Wheelie-bin left over from bin-“tax” protests.
Does this “no contract no consent” thing have ANY actual basis in law?
No.
None. But it is catchy and relatively easy to spell.
Really? So anyone can claim a contract with you without your consent?
In that case Jack Aranda you owe me €1 million for replying to your comment.
Can you show that it has legal standing? Because there’s going to be a lot of people losing in court if you’re wrong.
Reductio ad absurdum. Thanks, Zuppy!
expelliarmus!
No, but our public representatives can.
Given we gave them a mandate to consent to things like this for us.
Well actually yes it does. You cannot be charged for something which you did not consent to purchase or be charged for.
Indeeed. Nothing is stopping you collecting and treating your own water supply from today. But if you continue to use the public water your are implying your consent.
but accepting a product is implied consent and is the actual acceptance towards the contract.
seriously, you can’t just extract a line from a legal textbook and assume it is completely definitive
Nope
From reading the journal.ie breakdown of what water charges will cost you (sorry broadsheet) i think i will be paying at least €424 anyway.
well you may be charged 424 merkels. what you pay is your business – unless you choose to ‘do a johnny’ on it and spend an hour in the joy for non-payment.
Do Irish Water not have to prove that you are a customer of theirs before you are imprisoned? Without the relevant agreement in place, i.e signed contract by both parties, is it not a futile endeavour? Only asking. Where’s legal coffee drinker when you need him/her?
I’m selling apples at the side of the road. you pick one up and eat it. do you owe me money?
Not if I’ve always picked apples off those trees behind you and ate them for free.
fine, but then you should contribute to the maintenance of the Orchard like the rest. of us
Not necessarily, a quick scan of the S.I seems to show that Irish Water is a private company set up to facilitate water metering and billing. Your water is still being provided by the usual water authorities that have always provided it so by continuing to use it you are not necessarily agreeing to be billed by this third party. LCD where are you?
You can take the money, as you said you would, from the €10,000 taxes I pay you each year?
That should cover your apple.
this is it action man. who’s to say you don’t whizz in a bucket and throw it down the shore? or fill up a 5 litre bottle from work, or shower in the gym? this is going to make for some very interesting legal challenges down the road.
Does anyone know is the bill going to be annual or monthly or what? and if so what month will the annual bill be paid?
Quarterly, first bills in January for the three months from now ’til then, as I understand it. But the January bill won’t start accumulating until your meter is read in the next few weeks and the ball starts rolling ’til it’s read again in 3 months. So mid-late Jan I guess.
But there is no water meters installed in my area yet and like they couldn’t pick a worse month to start it like seriously who has an extra hundred euros in january?
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but non-payment of a bill is not a crime (it is an issue between you and the supplier). You would be referred to a commercial court (not a criminal court) that does not have the power to imprison you.
This is ridiculous – we have always paid for our water in Galway.
We are no longer getting any/much money from Europe to upgrade our infrastructure…where do people think we will get the money to cover the cost of treating water, upgrading of all the leaky pipes and treating all the foul water.
These are all services that we should pay for like ESB, Gas etc.
Where do you think its been paid from till now? The tax payers!
And now it will be pay by use. I don’t have to fund the feckers wasting water and I can have a say over how much I actually pay.
Yes, on top of what you are already paying.
“Now it will be paid by use”
So in your world you will see a happy reduction in your taxes?
To be precise: “now it will be paid for twice: firstly by taxes, and then again by use”
“The Indo ratcheting up the fear. Who needs a government press office?”
– or The Indo reporting relevant and pertinent news, maybe? Would it better if all the newspapers pretended that water charges weren’t happening?
who owns the indo?
who owns the contract for installing water meters?
think again buddy.
If it was only DOB’s media outlets that were talking about water charges you would have a point, but I think most people would concede that it is one of the more newsworthy issues of the moment.
my point is that it’s really only INM who are engaging in such blatant scare tactics. RTE last night had a more subtle approach, parading a very nice man involved in water harvesting explaining that harvested water is 3 times the price of irish water. at least RTE give you a reach around..
+1
-income tax..
I’m wondering how it is that Rob feels the Indo should tell this story.
Should there be pictures of children playing joyously in fields to colour a story about the risk associated with not registering?
In case there are still people who haven’t noticed, today is the day when people in the republic start being directly charged for the water they consume. It is pretty much THE issue of the day.
There are very few issues that are more important today.
The potential costs and potential penalties associated with water charges are the NEWS.
If the Independant ignored it the penalties would still be the penalties, if RTE didn’t cover the cost structure the cost structure would still be the cost structure.
I know that we live in an increasingly detached world where shite telly and the internet are acting as a proxy for real experience, but people must surely be aware that this thing is a thing regardless of media coverage.
All these people moaning about people complaining, you’re damn right. Why don’t people just sit down and accept that they can’t make a difference. You, as an individual, aren’t important. So stop arrogantly believing you are. Paul Murphy is just looking for a story to tell his pinko mates in the B*rn*rd Sh*w on a Friday night.
No surprises to see that massive failure Paul Murphy there.
Got my pack (finally) yesterday – indeed, a day before charges come into effect. Stinks of disorganisation.
Don’t like this ‘guessing’ of water consumption for 9 months one bit.
I also learn that billing will not include VAT…if they say this is a ‘utility bill’, why then do we pay VAT for the leccy and the gas?
Well, you don’t have to return it til the end of the month so you’ve plenty of time to fill it out. I only saw the Irish side ot the letter and it took me ages to remember what Deireadh Fomhair meant.
What about the Information Booklet? A day before the launch….come on.
I don’t like the assumption that the waste water collected is the same as the volume of water supplied. Nonsense. Water absorption? Evaporation?
Watering your garden….
Exactly, you hang out a wash and about 5litres evaporates and goes no where near the public sewage system.
It goes back into the atmosphere and then it rains which goes into the reservoirs and then comes out your tap?
But you’re paying them to take it away when it evaporates.
The charges state that consumption is 2.44/1000L and if you benefit from being connected to a public drain there’s an additional charge of 2.44/1000L to have it taken away, making it 4.88/1000L.
As they are not measuring the volume of waste water you put down the drain, on their website I.W make a scandalous assumption which states ‘The volume of water supplied is assumed to be equal to the volume of waste water removed’
This is clearly not so when not all water used by households ends up in the waste water system, so many people will be paying to have waste water taken away that wasn’t taken away.
What about the water you take into your house via beer, wine, fruit juices, milk, etc? That’s waste water that needs rid of but wasn’t sourced from the tap in the house.
The simplest solution is to work on the basis that water in = water out.
Cheer up guys. Sure you could wake up dead tomorrow.
Tell us about your favourite sweets from the 1980s. Go on.
Don’t be so smart Mr T. Running around shooting your mouth, when ya fall and break your legs, don’t come running crying to me.
I still don’t have my pack. Where do I complain?
Twitter, comment sections, maybe a blog post.
Let it all out here. We’re fierce sympathetic.
I think it’s a bastardisation of you can’t have a contract without consideration.
i.e. you can’t have a contract unless both parties gain something
In this case the customer’s “consideration” is the water amd waste water services
Irish Water’s is the money you pay
So by availing of the water and using the public drains you have recieved your consideration.
legal coffee drinker, where are you? we havent received our packet yet and i’ve heard that they cant do anything if you dont have a contract – including turning your water down or off (it’s in irish legislation; they can only “trickle” water at commercial buildings). i’m tempted to just wait and see what happens if we quietly ignore the whole thing. they’d surely send me a big ol pink letter before taking ua to actual court. but what are the charges? what IS the legality of this contract?
And if I say there are ten people living in my house, an I get 10 people’s allowances? Or will they come around to count us?
You’ll have to supply 10 PPS numbers to get 10 people’s allowances. No PPS number = no allowance.
so, say for example i opt to pay the flat rate at a higher charge, does that mean i get as much water as i want for that set fee? and if so, what’s to stop me from supplying that water to anyone else, for example others on my road, free of charge or in return for other goods and services?
I was think this too, theoretically could you not re route one houses water into multiple houses and share the bill, not a difficult process for a plumber id imagine
Not very likely either.
Socialist politicians told people not to pay bin charges, said people got burned with big bills with no help from socialist politicians.
Socialist politicians told people not to pay property taxes, said people got burned with big bills with no help from socialist politicians.
Socialist politicians tell people not to pay water charges, said people will get burned with big bills and…?
+ 1
smoking in pubs, never gonna happen
+1
I honestly cannot believe how effing stupid people are ITT.
“Yeah its Paul Murphy here, yeah I didnt get elected to Europe the first time, or the second time.
Well now I’m running in Dublin South West, so I’m REALLY hoping this water thing works out for me so I’ll finally get an ACTUAL mandate from the people…
Hello?”
That should be “Hello, Paul Murphy, I never got elected[full stop]”
if he was FG or Labour he’d be serving on a semi-state board right now.
My two flatmates and I pay about 400 pounds to Thames Water per year in London, so I’m not ideologically opposed or anything.
But it’d really boil my piss to give a cent to Irish Water. From start to finish it’s been a stitched up insult to citizens of this state, and it reeks of the same thing government departments are doing, turning the citizen of the state into a customer of the state. It’s really not a subtle distinction.
It pains me to give them a cent too. I support water conservation so I’m not against water-charging per se, but the way this has been managed and rolled-out is a joke.
Fine now were paying for utilities that used to be part of our general income tax, Now we should as Customers of the state question and demand a receipt of where and what is the rest of our absorbent income tax going on?
Agreed.
Water Conservation = Good.
Irish Water Omnishambles = Bad.
That’s £133 each p.a. which covers unlimited water in + water out. Water wasn’t metered when I lived in London – is that still the case? We will be “given free” the chance to have a quick shower, sh1t and shave before paying through the nose!
I registered online yesterday and a small part of me died in the process. No way can I afford not getting the free allowance (2 person household, one with care needs). I don’t want them to hit me in the pocket but I am very much hoping I’ll get the chance to hit someone, sometime, from Irish water in the face with a rather large water balloon.
They’ve got charitys in Africa that are collecting €2 a month to help people in Ireland that will have to walk miles to find a well with fresh clean drinking water.
For the people that have already given up lifes ‘Luxurys’ like.. TV and broadband subscriptions, struggling to pay a mortgage that they’re already in arrears with.. property tax, bin charges, the extortionate cost of living in ireland.. this is simply, a kick in the teeth. They are normal people, like a lot of us here just trying to survive, day to day..
Are we all blind to the fact that people are in need of help?
Poverty and suicide are going to be on the up, not because of the water charges, but because of a combinination of all these charges/taxes and the arrears hanging over peoples heads.
What’s Ireland without it’s people?
Help Irish people survive.
ya see, when they have water charges in line with the cost of petrol, then they roll out the car that runs on water.
the extra allowance for certain medical conditions is granted based on an honour system.