€400 for water: REALLY?

Given how miserably wet today and most of the year has been it's hard to believe that soon we will be paying for water... And it looks like it’s going to be quite a lot.

By Brian Moss

There are many cool things you could probably spend 400 quid on; some Ryanair flights, premiership season tickets, several hundred copies of the latest German edition of Playboy (if you like Rosanna Davidson that is) but how about the new water charge, it’s enough to bring us to boiling point…

Reports today suggest that households could be hit with annual water charges of anywhere between €100 and €400, according to the Bord Gáis Chief Executive, John Mullins. The water boy said average bills across Europe fall within that bracket so Ireland will follow suit.

Mullins, who heads the body with responsibility of setting up the new service, admitted the Exchequer will have to fund the system, even though business and domestic customers will be charged. Mullins was speaking on the RTE wireless this morning where he also revealed that the original completion date for the water meter installation of 2014 has now been pushed back to 2015.

Ireland is currently the only OECD member where households don’t pay directly for water. As we know we pissed away boom time money like water through a sieve so the government needs to get money from somewhere to pay our German overlords, but 400 quid seems a bit much!

For the vast majority of those who don’t have their own wells the charges will be somewhere between 100 and 400 euro’s - we love the definite detail here.  So your choices are to pucker up the cash or be without water.

It will gall most people in to country no doubt, given that we get free water for the heavens on an almost daily basis that we’ll have to pay quite a bit for the service. However It could be worse you could be from Ballynahinch, in Co Galway, which holds the Guinness world record for being the wettest place in Ireland or Britain, so ever water cloud has a silver lining…