Another Irish Water cockamamie outrage is on the way. They’re bringing in charges for excess use. Why?
According to RTE, repeated by the Examiner above, the Irish Water position is:
“It estimates that around 80,000 households around the country use more than 213,000 litres of water a year.”
Doesn’t that sound scandalous? 213,000 is just massive, isn’t it. But let’s do the math. 213,000 litres a year is 583 litres a day. The standard estimated (efficient) average daily use per person is 129 litres. So, if there were just one person in your household and you were using 583 litres, that WOULD indeed be scandalous.
But, how many Irish households have five or more people [5*129 is 645 litres a day, which is greater than the 583 litres which Irish Water thinks is so scandalous]?
Answer per Census 2016, 230,243*. So, you would expect 230,243 households to use more than 213,000 litres a year. But, according to irish Water, just 80,000 are using more than that amount. So, not for the first time, we’re being hit with an excess charging regime which will cost 10s of millions to administer each year and which really isn’t going to have much or any impact. It’s like the argument that charges lead to reduced consumption when the evidence from the UK, where they DO have charges, is, they use more than us Irish.
It should come as no surprise that Irish Water as incompetent in implementing excess charging as they are with keeping pee and poo out of Dublin bay. It’s time for new protests to stop these clowns before this poo gets out of hand.
Per Census 2016 – 1.7m households with 4.7m people total in our State.
Households – 5 person household 154,841 (774,205 people)
Households – 6 person household 54,016 (324,096 people)
Households – 7 person household 14,282 (99,974 people)
Households – 8 person household 4,459 (35,672 people)
Households – 9 or more person household 2,645 (23,807 people)
Man On Fire
The vile indo has a two page spread full of the same poo.
The Irish Times has ran two stories dedicated to Irish water so far this week.
Blatant cheerleading.
eoin
I think they had Paul Murphy on the Virgin late night current affairs programme last night which looked like an old Bruce Lee movie with Paul having to fight off all the old arguments for charging for water. There’s definitely a push to resurrect charges, some people for ideological reasons, others because they’re chasing business or lobbying for those chasing business.
Man On Fire
The Irish Times has a full page spread puff piece devoted to Irish Water.
BobbyJ
Nice big BAM construction advert on the front page too
eoin
Yep, it’s probably taking up the space where the Irish Times would have reported on all the health projects that are not now going ahead because of the overspend at the National Childrens Hospital where the lead contractor is…… BAM.
What was it Leo said in the Dail this year? “there are one or two contractors who, quite frankly, I would not like to see get a public contract again in this State” I wonder if he still feels the same after the Dutch royals bent his ears recently (it’s formally called Royal Dutch BAM Groep)
We’d be lost without you Eoin.. great detail. Just the thin edge of full charges. The Green Party will support them after the next election. It will be for the environment.!!!
millie st murderlark
Credit where credit is due eoin.
B9Com From No
It’s analysis and it’s very, very … oh
SOQ
Should they not be taking the number per household into account when calculating excess? The problem there is- unless the householder has informed them of such, how would they know? Likewise- what is to stop a single occupant from claiming there is ten?
But in my mind, the big one is actually apartment blocks. Most were built as cheaply as possible which means communal water supplies- it is impossible to meter such without re-plumbing the entire block.
So if anyone reading this lives in an apartment block and is receiving a meter reading, it would be worth enquiring as to how. They were billing people on private water schemes after all, so anything is possible.
Hector Ramirez
Yesterday morning, Irish water head of asset management said ‘there is a leakage nationally of 43% or *37% in Dublin, we are planning on investing €500m to 2021 to reduce this..’
Interviewer:what are you hoping to reduce it to?
‘The aim is to get to 41…or 42%…’
*figure disputed by Kennedy analysis on RTE primetime
SB
I presume the block itself would get charged, and it would form part of the Management Fee for residents.
GiggidyGoo
Billing system has to be paid for. That’s about it. the past few weeks it’s been IW this, that and the other in the media.
SOQ
Were they not to take over the commercial billing from the councils?
B9Com From No
+ €several million in IT procurement
Man On Fire
“Varadkar tax reforms could favour high earners”
Surprise surprise..
MaryLou's ArmaLite
What do they consider a high earner?
Cian
Taxes are mostly paid by high earners, because, well,low earners don’t have as much money.
Cuts to taxes will always ‘favour’ high earners….because they pay most tax.
Man On Fire
Tell me again what his promise was wrt middle earners and tell me what that report states wrt to middl earners?
MaryLou's ArmaLite
Raising the upper threshold to €50k will benefit middle income earners a lot more that high earners.
Adding a few €k to the paycheck of someone earning €50k will make a much bigger difference to their cashflow than adding it to someone earning €150k.
ReproBertie
There’s the tea boy waving a kipper around while talking about fisheries in the Isle of Man.
The Isle of Man is not part of the UK.
The Isle of Man is not in the EU.
The Isle of Man is, however, in the EU customs union.
Clearly it’s not a kipper but a red herring.
GiggidyGoo
BJ is a little manx
shayna
Jesus – I got lost in the detail. Nice one eoin!
GiggidyGoo
Harris says he will bring a plan to government in 12 months for the break up of the HSE. ROFL. Harris won’t be health minister in 12 months. FG won’t be in government in 12 months. The boy is a joke.
Cian
This is low even for you.
Should all ministers do nothing because thay may not be around to see it through?
The HSE isn’t working. Spending time to look at the various options for splitting it up isn’t a waste – regardless of who will be the minister in 12 months.
Hector Ramirez
Harris believes HSE was never fit for purpose… How long is/(was) he (and varadkar) minister, how long is FG in government and only now doing something… When will they realise Eoghan Murphy too is not fit for purpose?
martco
@cian would be happy if FG had something in the region of 1,000 years…the main thing to know is that it was broken before they got there ….sure it isn’t even 10 years in government yet so they’ve loadsa time to play with. you’ll be dead long before they’re finished making anything work anyway so, like, just go play with faceapp or something y’know?
dav
yeah they are breaking up the HSE to set up “Regional” health boards – but it’s NOT a return to the old days of regional health boards… those lads must be on something..
bigx
The judges ruling re residence and immigrants defies logic.Your country of residence is not determined by where you are at a particular time.When I go on my holidays I dont cease to be an irish resident. People like Ivan Yeates seeking to avoid their debtors in Ireland by declaring bankrupsy abroad had to take quite a lot of measures to establish their residency abroad. Can you imagine a judge accepting you are not an irish resident because of that day trip to the Isle of Man with the suitcase full of money. Presence in the country and permanent residence are not the same thing. Lets not go down the trump road of daft interpretations of the law to exclude people.
Listrade
Gonna defend the judge. Judges don’t make legislation or write it. They do make an interpretation of the meaning of a term or word, especially if it is a word that hasn’t been challenged in court before. The judge is right: “continuous” means without a break, “continual” allows for breaks. We can probably forgive the fact that the legislation was drafted in the 50s, but a judge can only rule on the legislation that is on the books, even the badly written stuff. It’s pretty clear to me in the judges summary that they don’t necessarily agree with the principle and that maybe it’d be a good idea to change the legislation, but when they wrote it, they used continuous, didn’t check a dictionary and that’s what we’re stuck with.
I had a decade of having to deal with this crap with new legislation. Continually (zing!) beating my head against a table because the people drafting the legislation didn’t know how courts worked, didn’t appreciate that if we don’t have precedent for the term, then the judge could only refer to a strict interpretation of the dictionary definition. Something that could cause problems.
It’s a simple enough amendment. Change continuous to continual and have the current policy as being accepted allowance for breaks.
TLDR: judge did what judges are supposed to do when interpreting “grey” terms in legislation and there’s been little change in government failing to understand literal interpretation of terms since this legislation was written.
eoin
The descent of our neighbours into a police state was chillingly revealed in the House of Commons yesterday (they’re still working, they’ll be working until next week when they’ll take just over 5 weeks holidays, our lot are off for 10 weeks).
The government was asked (by a Tory MP no less) about surveillance of journalists.
“can the Minister reassure the House that these intrusive surveillance techniques were not used against journalists in this case and that they would never be used unless there was either a serious crime or a real and serious threat to national security?”
I wouldn’t be surprised if the broadcast charge is sneaked onto the agenda again as the Dail is off for over 10 weeks (compared to less than six in the UK). After they pulled the Irish Water water charges stunt, they could pull anything.
The London Times today reports the BBC is considering a subscription model.
““You could decide the BBC is a subscription service,” Lord Hall of Birkenhead [the BBC boss and employee for decades] told MPs. “It would be very, very different to the sort of BBC you have now, because you would be giving subscribers what they want, not the breadth of the population.” He added: “I would argue that’s the wrong model for supporting the BBC.””
Subscriptions would force RTE to offer what people wanted and to cut its cloth according to its means so slan leat to the €495,000 Ryan Tubridy.
edalicious
If I didn’t know any better, I would think you were arguing for the privatisation of public service there, eoin.
eoin
Remind us again how RTE is “public service” while Virgin/TV3 and Newstalk/RedFM are “private sector”? What makes RTE “public service”? Is it the fact it’s the biggest private sector advertiser from the print/broadcast sector, while in the UK, the BBC’s USP is, it doesn’t take adverts? Is it the €495,000 salary for Ryan Tubridy or the €295,000 for Marian? Very “public service” alright! Is it the ratings that are now so pee-poor that RTE no longer publishes audience shares in its annual report? And even if they did publish declines in share, they’d be ignoring the migration of its audience to Netflix/Amazon, Sky/Virgin.
And anyway, after RTE sold off the Montrose land, the UK spectrum and is now lining up the RTE Guide, shure, isn’t it being privatised anyway?
Charlie
Trump does a Nuremberg rally
millie st murderlark
I’m holding out for a moustache
SOQ
Just stop shaving dear- works for me every time.
Rob_G
Clare Daly hired Mick Wallace’s son as her assistant in the European Parliament.
Handy number, that – high salary, almost tax-free. I wonder what Clare Daly would have to say in the Dáil if appointments to the public service here were made based on familial connections, instead of by an independent panel or an exam?
Same applies to criticism applies to the case above – there you go.
newsjustin
LOL at Clare Daly hiring Mick Wallace’s son as assistant. Keeping it in the family. I’d say there was a tough recruitment process there.
Rob_G
In a very sensible move, the European Parliament banned MEPs hiring close family relations as assistants a couple of years ago. A very common workaround, particularly among UKIP, anti-EU Gravy Train types, was for for MEP A to hire MEP B’s son as his assistant, while MEP B would hire MEP A’s wife as his assistant, just as Daly and Wallace have done here.
Well, good work if you can get it.
Paulus
Ah Clare,
The moment I heard this I swear
I felt as if something somewhere
had happened to you.
You know this won’t do?
And then,
The moment I read it again
well I give you ten out of ten
for having such neck
as to think “what the heck”
Another Irish Water cockamamie outrage is on the way. They’re bringing in charges for excess use. Why?
According to RTE, repeated by the Examiner above, the Irish Water position is:
“It estimates that around 80,000 households around the country use more than 213,000 litres of water a year.”
Doesn’t that sound scandalous? 213,000 is just massive, isn’t it. But let’s do the math. 213,000 litres a year is 583 litres a day. The standard estimated (efficient) average daily use per person is 129 litres. So, if there were just one person in your household and you were using 583 litres, that WOULD indeed be scandalous.
But, how many Irish households have five or more people [5*129 is 645 litres a day, which is greater than the 583 litres which Irish Water thinks is so scandalous]?
Answer per Census 2016, 230,243*. So, you would expect 230,243 households to use more than 213,000 litres a year. But, according to irish Water, just 80,000 are using more than that amount. So, not for the first time, we’re being hit with an excess charging regime which will cost 10s of millions to administer each year and which really isn’t going to have much or any impact. It’s like the argument that charges lead to reduced consumption when the evidence from the UK, where they DO have charges, is, they use more than us Irish.
It should come as no surprise that Irish Water as incompetent in implementing excess charging as they are with keeping pee and poo out of Dublin bay. It’s time for new protests to stop these clowns before this poo gets out of hand.
Per Census 2016 – 1.7m households with 4.7m people total in our State.
Households – 5 person household 154,841 (774,205 people)
Households – 6 person household 54,016 (324,096 people)
Households – 7 person household 14,282 (99,974 people)
Households – 8 person household 4,459 (35,672 people)
Households – 9 or more person household 2,645 (23,807 people)
The vile indo has a two page spread full of the same poo.
The Irish Times has ran two stories dedicated to Irish water so far this week.
Blatant cheerleading.
I think they had Paul Murphy on the Virgin late night current affairs programme last night which looked like an old Bruce Lee movie with Paul having to fight off all the old arguments for charging for water. There’s definitely a push to resurrect charges, some people for ideological reasons, others because they’re chasing business or lobbying for those chasing business.
The Irish Times has a full page spread puff piece devoted to Irish Water.
Nice big BAM construction advert on the front page too
Yep, it’s probably taking up the space where the Irish Times would have reported on all the health projects that are not now going ahead because of the overspend at the National Childrens Hospital where the lead contractor is…… BAM.
What was it Leo said in the Dail this year? “there are one or two contractors who, quite frankly, I would not like to see get a public contract again in this State” I wonder if he still feels the same after the Dutch royals bent his ears recently (it’s formally called Royal Dutch BAM Groep)
+1 for the data!
Sourced from here
https://www.cso.ie/px/pxeirestat/Statire/SelectVarVal/Define.asp?maintable=E4005&PLanguage=0
++1
data and links {swoon}
Clean up on aisle Cian.
We’d be lost without you Eoin.. great detail. Just the thin edge of full charges. The Green Party will support them after the next election. It will be for the environment.!!!
Credit where credit is due eoin.
It’s analysis and it’s very, very … oh
Should they not be taking the number per household into account when calculating excess? The problem there is- unless the householder has informed them of such, how would they know? Likewise- what is to stop a single occupant from claiming there is ten?
But in my mind, the big one is actually apartment blocks. Most were built as cheaply as possible which means communal water supplies- it is impossible to meter such without re-plumbing the entire block.
So if anyone reading this lives in an apartment block and is receiving a meter reading, it would be worth enquiring as to how. They were billing people on private water schemes after all, so anything is possible.
Yesterday morning, Irish water head of asset management said ‘there is a leakage nationally of 43% or *37% in Dublin, we are planning on investing €500m to 2021 to reduce this..’
Interviewer:what are you hoping to reduce it to?
‘The aim is to get to 41…or 42%…’
*figure disputed by Kennedy analysis on RTE primetime
I presume the block itself would get charged, and it would form part of the Management Fee for residents.
Billing system has to be paid for. That’s about it. the past few weeks it’s been IW this, that and the other in the media.
Were they not to take over the commercial billing from the councils?
+ €several million in IT procurement
“Varadkar tax reforms could favour high earners”
Surprise surprise..
What do they consider a high earner?
Taxes are mostly paid by high earners, because, well,low earners don’t have as much money.
Cuts to taxes will always ‘favour’ high earners….because they pay most tax.
Tell me again what his promise was wrt middle earners and tell me what that report states wrt to middl earners?
Raising the upper threshold to €50k will benefit middle income earners a lot more that high earners.
Adding a few €k to the paycheck of someone earning €50k will make a much bigger difference to their cashflow than adding it to someone earning €150k.
There’s the tea boy waving a kipper around while talking about fisheries in the Isle of Man.
The Isle of Man is not part of the UK.
The Isle of Man is not in the EU.
The Isle of Man is, however, in the EU customs union.
Clearly it’s not a kipper but a red herring.
BJ is a little manx
Jesus – I got lost in the detail. Nice one eoin!
Harris says he will bring a plan to government in 12 months for the break up of the HSE. ROFL. Harris won’t be health minister in 12 months. FG won’t be in government in 12 months. The boy is a joke.
This is low even for you.
Should all ministers do nothing because thay may not be around to see it through?
The HSE isn’t working. Spending time to look at the various options for splitting it up isn’t a waste – regardless of who will be the minister in 12 months.
Harris believes HSE was never fit for purpose… How long is/(was) he (and varadkar) minister, how long is FG in government and only now doing something… When will they realise Eoghan Murphy too is not fit for purpose?
@cian would be happy if FG had something in the region of 1,000 years…the main thing to know is that it was broken before they got there ….sure it isn’t even 10 years in government yet so they’ve loadsa time to play with. you’ll be dead long before they’re finished making anything work anyway so, like, just go play with faceapp or something y’know?
yeah they are breaking up the HSE to set up “Regional” health boards – but it’s NOT a return to the old days of regional health boards… those lads must be on something..
The judges ruling re residence and immigrants defies logic.Your country of residence is not determined by where you are at a particular time.When I go on my holidays I dont cease to be an irish resident. People like Ivan Yeates seeking to avoid their debtors in Ireland by declaring bankrupsy abroad had to take quite a lot of measures to establish their residency abroad. Can you imagine a judge accepting you are not an irish resident because of that day trip to the Isle of Man with the suitcase full of money. Presence in the country and permanent residence are not the same thing. Lets not go down the trump road of daft interpretations of the law to exclude people.
Gonna defend the judge. Judges don’t make legislation or write it. They do make an interpretation of the meaning of a term or word, especially if it is a word that hasn’t been challenged in court before. The judge is right: “continuous” means without a break, “continual” allows for breaks. We can probably forgive the fact that the legislation was drafted in the 50s, but a judge can only rule on the legislation that is on the books, even the badly written stuff. It’s pretty clear to me in the judges summary that they don’t necessarily agree with the principle and that maybe it’d be a good idea to change the legislation, but when they wrote it, they used continuous, didn’t check a dictionary and that’s what we’re stuck with.
I had a decade of having to deal with this crap with new legislation. Continually (zing!) beating my head against a table because the people drafting the legislation didn’t know how courts worked, didn’t appreciate that if we don’t have precedent for the term, then the judge could only refer to a strict interpretation of the dictionary definition. Something that could cause problems.
It’s a simple enough amendment. Change continuous to continual and have the current policy as being accepted allowance for breaks.
TLDR: judge did what judges are supposed to do when interpreting “grey” terms in legislation and there’s been little change in government failing to understand literal interpretation of terms since this legislation was written.
The descent of our neighbours into a police state was chillingly revealed in the House of Commons yesterday (they’re still working, they’ll be working until next week when they’ll take just over 5 weeks holidays, our lot are off for 10 weeks).
The government was asked (by a Tory MP no less) about surveillance of journalists.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2019-07-17/debates/31934AA2-DDA2-4318-BEDC-DD3B6107EB08/PoliceSurveillanceOfJournalists
“can the Minister reassure the House that these intrusive surveillance techniques were not used against journalists in this case and that they would never be used unless there was either a serious crime or a real and serious threat to national security?”
No, he can not.
Reality bites.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/07/varadkars-backstop-gamble-could-cost-ireland-dearly/
What we need is more Brexit-busting ships …
But the EU have our backs ….
Heh,heh,heh …
…Oh John Bercow…heh, heh heh
oh Liam Halligan – Unicorns and stardust – not much “reality”
https://www.leavemeansleave.eu/media/liam-halligan-trade-outside-eu-wto-rules-cant-bad/
‘Most of our trade is outside the EU under WTO rules – so it can’t be all that bad!?’ Watch Liam Halligan speak about a ’no deal’ Brexit on the Daily Politics Show
I wouldn’t be surprised if the broadcast charge is sneaked onto the agenda again as the Dail is off for over 10 weeks (compared to less than six in the UK). After they pulled the Irish Water water charges stunt, they could pull anything.
The London Times today reports the BBC is considering a subscription model.
““You could decide the BBC is a subscription service,” Lord Hall of Birkenhead [the BBC boss and employee for decades] told MPs. “It would be very, very different to the sort of BBC you have now, because you would be giving subscribers what they want, not the breadth of the population.” He added: “I would argue that’s the wrong model for supporting the BBC.””
Subscriptions would force RTE to offer what people wanted and to cut its cloth according to its means so slan leat to the €495,000 Ryan Tubridy.
If I didn’t know any better, I would think you were arguing for the privatisation of public service there, eoin.
Remind us again how RTE is “public service” while Virgin/TV3 and Newstalk/RedFM are “private sector”? What makes RTE “public service”? Is it the fact it’s the biggest private sector advertiser from the print/broadcast sector, while in the UK, the BBC’s USP is, it doesn’t take adverts? Is it the €495,000 salary for Ryan Tubridy or the €295,000 for Marian? Very “public service” alright! Is it the ratings that are now so pee-poor that RTE no longer publishes audience shares in its annual report? And even if they did publish declines in share, they’d be ignoring the migration of its audience to Netflix/Amazon, Sky/Virgin.
And anyway, after RTE sold off the Montrose land, the UK spectrum and is now lining up the RTE Guide, shure, isn’t it being privatised anyway?
Trump does a Nuremberg rally
I’m holding out for a moustache
Just stop shaving dear- works for me every time.
Clare Daly hired Mick Wallace’s son as her assistant in the European Parliament.
Handy number, that – high salary, almost tax-free. I wonder what Clare Daly would have to say in the Dáil if appointments to the public service here were made based on familial connections, instead of by an independent panel or an exam?
https://connachttribune.ie/ciaran-cannon-defiant-on-staff-jobs-for-family-members/
Ok.
Same applies to criticism applies to the case above – there you go.
LOL at Clare Daly hiring Mick Wallace’s son as assistant. Keeping it in the family. I’d say there was a tough recruitment process there.
In a very sensible move, the European Parliament banned MEPs hiring close family relations as assistants a couple of years ago. A very common workaround, particularly among UKIP, anti-EU Gravy Train types, was for for MEP A to hire MEP B’s son as his assistant, while MEP B would hire MEP A’s wife as his assistant, just as Daly and Wallace have done here.
Well, good work if you can get it.
Ah Clare,
The moment I heard this I swear
I felt as if something somewhere
had happened to you.
You know this won’t do?
And then,
The moment I read it again
well I give you ten out of ten
for having such neck
as to think “what the heck”
La-la-la la la-la la.