People — get bothered. Fast. Without major investment, serious political will, and a change in attitudes towards a precious resource, the continuance of a steady water supply for the vast majority will become highly questionable in the years to come. 

Apart from playing catch-up and meeting the unique demands of the Irish economy, the State is also grappling with the reality that this is the only developed country on the planet that delivers water free of charge to its citizens.

Last week, Uisce Éireann chairman Jerry Grant told a conference that the State’s water and sewage systems “are in a desperate state” because of “passive indifference” around investment in the infrastructure.

His comments echoed those of the water body’s asset strategy manager, who told the Irish Planning Institute last October that funding for the next five years will have to be of the order of €10bn, double what it was since 2019, just to stand still. Should that level of investment not occur, should the healthy State coffers get depleted in the current global upheaval, water shortages in the next decade are a real possibility.

The song remains the same when it comes to connecting up new homes. Currently, a wide range of sources are suggesting, conservatively, that the State needs about 50,000 new homes every year in the coming decade to meet demand. 

Last week, the Banking and Payments Federation, an umbrella group for the banks which fund much of housing, stated that currently there is capacity to connect just 35,000 homes annually. So even if issues around funding, planning, and capacity are successfully tackled in relation to housing, there would still be a problem providing water to new homes.

These are daunting forecasts, but they are not alarmist. Until the 1990s, Ireland had a substandard water infrastructure as befitting what was a poor country. There has been a fair bit of work done since to bring its infrastructure up to the standard required of a high-income society.

The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council says Ireland now appears to have “caught up to other high-income European countries over the last 25 years”.

By some measures, we now have an average level of infrastructure compared to other equivalent European countries. However, the unique features of the Irish economy, and society, means that we still have a way to go.

For instance, a high concentration of pharmaceutical companies, along with those from the information and communication technology sectors, including data centres, exercise a huge demand for water. These sectors are also the very ones that contribute hugely to the national coffers through taxes which in turn are used to pay for upgrading water and wastewater infrastructure.

In simple terms, the infrastructure has not kept pace with the economy.

Then there is domestic demand. The infrastructure, which has been upgraded, has not been expanded sufficiently, particularly in the major urban areas. For instance, a single pipeline delivers around 40% of all the water for Dublin.

“That is 50 years old,” the Uisce Éireann chairman told an architects’ conference last week. “We know there’s about 25 leaks on it. It could blow up in the morning and cause us massive difficulty.”

Leakage remains a major issue, notwithstanding the programme of repairs and replacement undertaken by Uisce Éireann since its predecessor, Irish Water, was established a decade ago.

Water charges

This brings us to the other bugbear in terms of water — the absence of any system of charging for this precious resource.

The failure to introduce water charges is well documented. It was attempted at a time of austerity and, in that respect, became the straw that smashed the camel’s back as far as many sections of society were concerned. The attempt was also cack-handed and undertaken by a Fine Gael-led government that was tone deaf to what was being endured by those at the sharp end of austerity. 

In other countries where the fallout from the 2008 economic crash was delivering pain and pestilence, the reaction ended with riots in some cases and political upheaval elsewhere. Here, it all appears to have been poured into resistance to a new charge for water.

The ultimate outcome was that water charges developed a political toxicity that is completely at odds with its purpose or impact. This was most recently seen in the reaction last month to a suggestion that the current Government was intent on introducing a charge for excess use.

A chorus of political voices decried what was a policy to incentivise users to fix leaks and to require big users to curtail their habits. Inevitably, notwithstanding the proposal’s arrival in the early months of a new, stable Government, it was shelved. So it was that parties of the left ran to the aid of the better-off sections of society which constitute the biggest offenders in this respect.

Water charges, even in the original form mooted by the government, would not solve the looming infrastructure crisis. It would, however, have provided some independent income for Uisce Éireann and possibly have given it leverage to invest more than the sums it elicits from central funding. The other outcome may well have been to instigate some form of a mentality that would have engendered respect for use of the resource.

Instead, water will continue to be treated as something that everybody and anybody should have access to in unlimited supply until such time as it simply stops coming out of the tap in a clean, treated form. As such, the challenges facing the State in building and maintaining a proper infrastructure are multi-faceted.