Thaw brings threat of water crisis

During the height of Storm Emma, a water crisis did not really feature on the horizon of most people’s list of inconvenient consequences.

But as the thaw firmly takes hold in most counties - with the exception of Kildare, Wexford and west Wicklow - we are beginning to see domino effects. And, of course, when your system is already near breaking point, the logical consequence is that even the slightest bit of further pressure will make it snap.

We have a capital that is already straining at near capacity when it comes to water supply. It’s not quite Los Angeles or Cape Town, but Dublin already draws 40 per cent of water from its primary source, the Liffey. There are times when the system is working at full capacity. A summer drought will mean water rationing.

In short, Dublin needs to go to a new extraction source, the Shannon at the Parteen Basin, to cater for the current population and the quarter-of-a-million increase in population over the next 20 to 25 years.

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In the meantime, any event - even a short, sharp shock - like the extreme weather of the past week will bring the system to breaking point.

As we report in our main story today, Dublin now faces the prospect of weeks of water restrictions because of supply shortages. The first bite of that came last night and this morning when householders faced water restrictions for 12 hours from 7pm to 7am.

Similarly, another system under huge pressure is also feeling the post-storm strain. During the bad weather, there were few discharges from hospitals. With a back-up of admissions, in addition to a huge number of “slip-and-fall” type accidents arriving in A&E, the numbers of bedless patients waiting in corridors and wards has shot up to the kind of peak usually seen in early January.

As the experience of two decades has shown, there is no easy fix for that phenomenon either.

The politics of water has been a corroding influence on Irish politics over the past five years. Shortages such as this underline the argument for a single water utility - as opposed to 30 separate council operations - to run the State’s water supplies and systems in a uniform and efficient way. The population of Ireland, after all, is no bigger than a large city in the United States.

That’s separate from the argument as to whether or not the utility should be State-owned. But it does raise the issue of charges. Sure, the primary source of water wastage is leaks from antiquated systems, particularly in Dublin where it is a massive 36 to 37 per cent.

But there was also the phenomenon during the weekend of irresponsible householders deliberately leaving their taps running to prevent any burst water pipes on their properties.

Without meters, it’s going to be impossible to locate these households. And without charging, it’s going to be impossible to sanction them.

This goes back to one of the fundamental political problems of the water issue. How can those who carelessly waste this precious resource be made responsible for their actions?

The anti-water campaigners had no real solution for this, other than clumsy and imprecise district meters, or lengthy investigations. It remains to be seen if the compromise cobbled together by Fianna Fail and Fine Gael on the issue will work.

SCU falls victim to bad communications

The Strategic Communications Unit sounded like a risky venture from day one. This was the unit, headed by John Concannon, that would modernise Government communications. Its woes form the basis for one of our main political stories today.

There was merit to the argument for the unit. There were 170 yearly campaigns from a myriad of Government departments and agencies, some rowing against each other. It needed to be coherent, and unified.

Some of the unit’s ideas have merit, not least bringing all of Government under one portal, gov.ie, as has happened in Britain and Germany.

The problem was that this wasn’t a company or a project. This was Government peopled by politicians from parties whose partisan natures defined them.

Moreover, the unit had responsibility for communicating the not-so-good news - this would have been a problem for essentially a marketing unit, whose natural default is to accentuate the positive.

From day one, the Opposition dubbed the SCU a “propaganda unit” for the Government and for Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, whose brainchild it was.

And the controversy over advertorials in the past week shows how vulnerable its set-up and status is. The SCU, because it is peopled by civil servants, cannot respond to the criticism. That is done through default, by the politicians it is, ahem, not meant to be serving.

The ins-and-outs of the advertorial story are nuanced. There was a stipulation that the word “advertising” should not appear, although some newspapers did not follow that instruction. In its place was the much softer “in partnership with”. It blurred the line between editorial and advertorial.

Most of the paid-for content was branded and would have been identifiable as paid content by everybody save the village fool.

Still, a few national publications crossed a line and three provincial papers (out of 25) published pictures of local Fine Gael senators, and one councillor. That constituted poor handling, but some of the bigger claims that the SCU had tried to make all the newspapers into Pravda were fanciful.

Still, with all of the Opposition rounding on the unit, it looks like its goose is cooked. Leo Varadkar’s comments yesterday that it has become a “distraction” suggest it has become toast.