UNTIL recently, you wouldn't have found Group Water Schemes on the list of suppurating public issues because nothing had happened to disturb any consumer's sense of entitlement.
But then the Cabinet met and decided - collectively, as good Cabinets do - that domestic water charges should be removed from all urban and some rural dwellers, thus damping down the incendiary sense of rage and wounded entitlement caused by water charges.
That sense of entitlement dates from the decision in 1977 to do away with rates. This was a popular decision - a real break out the bonfires lads decision. But popular decisions, once implemented, become part of the way people think and operate.
They move from bonfire celebration to absolute routine, and when you have a large population of people in their late 20s and 30s at the time such a decision comes along, they do not sit around the fire at night talking about how good it feels not to have to pay rates. They just incorporate the absence of rates seamlessly into their finances and develop a sense of entitlement thick as a callous.
A later local authority bill for a relatively smaller sum related to water rates becomes a huge insult to that sense of entitlement.
This is what happened over the last couple of years, and the Government decided (one must logically assume in the interests of removing potential topics suitable for single issue candidates) to remove the water charges.
Nobody around the Cabinet table seems to have extrapolated from this decision its impact on the next group of people whose sense of entitlement was going to be traumatised.
Three parties sat around the Cabinet table and decided, in essence, to keep the big conurbations happy. They don't seem to have copped that there are still a few people outside those conurbations who have an acute sense of entitlement, and that the inequity caused by this decision would be outrageously and immediately apparent to them.
THAT the Government found time for minor political point scoring against the Opposition for getting into the business of promises, promises" is surprising, given the need for a formula of retreat which would minimise egg on Coalition faces.
A similar formula for tactical retreat is likely to be called for in relation to the rural policing issue.
Rural policing was introduced by way of two pilot schemes in 1982, with 12 further schemes in 1991. It was reviewed in 1994 and, not unexpectedly, found to have worked very well in certain areas, but less well in others. Where it worked, it tended to have back up support and resources were loaded into it. Where it did not work as well, it tended to have poor back up and minimal resources.
But even the statistical documentation from the more successful areas does not define the real impact of rural policing. That impact is vast and subtle.
We have large numbers of older people living alone in rural Ireland - crime victims in waiting. A strong visible Garda presence has an impact on their lives quite outside the crimes solved or mitigated by Garda intervention. There is a deterrent factor. There is an invisible protection factor. There is a perception of safety - and perception, these days, is nine tenths of the law.
Rural dwellers should be entitled to expect that the local Garda station will be open every day at a suitable time. In some areas, evenings might be preferable to mornings.
The scheme as operated has not always been so responsive to real local need. Partly because real local need was not identified before a ham fisted marketing approach was taken, comprising in many areas a mail shot, which many people assumed to be junk mail, announcing a scheme untailored by real consultation within the community. The end result was often nearly right - like the Green Man episode.
The Green Man was one of those high tech improvements that, like a bad skin graft, is rejected decisively by, those supposed to benefit from it.
It was a gizmo on the door of Garda stations which was connected to district HQ. The theory was that when the station was closed, you pressed a button and talked into a machine. Rural people too often feel they're talking to a wall anyway. So the Green Man is about to get his P45; to be replaced, bit by bit, by Telecom Eireann's Phone Plus system, which ensures that if you ring a Garda station which happens to be closed, your call will be rerouted to district headquarters.
NOTHING, however, compares to the visible presence of real live gardai. Many concerned with the quality of rural life had been cheered by reports of positive consultations within communities, with the implication that the rural policing scheme was to be extended in a planned, responsive way.
Strange, then, to find the Taoiseach, on St Valentine's Day, describing as "mischievous" attempts to imply that the scheme is about to be extended a bit like saying it is mischievous to imply that more red roses will be given to women this year than were given last year.
If red roses are a good thing, why would it be mischievous to envisage more generosity in their distribution? If rural policing is a good thing, why on earth is it mischievous to speculate about it being extended?
I suspect the reason is that the Taoiseach doesn't like the sense of entitlement older people in rural Ireland feel on this matter and the fact that they are flexing their electoral muscle. But that sense of entitlement is not so easily quelled. It may exact a price for being underestimated, come the general election.