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John Leahy became leader of Renua Ireland in September 2016. I spoke to him about aspects of his policies set out on the Renua website, including the proposal to
Introduce 90-day detention orders for those Gardai suspect of being actively involved in preparations to murder another or of being responsible for directing the activities of an organised criminal gang.
Jailing people for any length of time because of what gardaí suspect that they might do in the future would almost certainly be unconstitutional. Also, Renua will
campaign for the return of national vetoes over all policy areas and the abandonment of Qualified Majority Voting [and] … introduce an Australian-type points system for inter-EU migration. We do not believe that the free movement of people is an essential element of any customs union.
There is no prospect of implementing any of these policies without first leaving the EU.
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I like free stuff. I think everyone does. Even when it’s not really free.
I was on holiday recently in a hotel where they did breakfast as one of those buffet things where you can collect whatever from a huge array of food. There was pancakes, every type of cereal, cooked breakfasts, scrambled eggs, different breads, hot croissants and pastries, cake – cake for breakfast – cheeses and I dunno what else.
I ate myself stupid. Some people have the presence of mind to just collect a couple of things that they want. I don’t have that sort of self-control. And the worst of it was that I wasn’t even able to eat half the things that I collected, even by stuffing myself, so I either had to eat myself even sicker, or watch it go to waste. And the food wasn’t even all that good. It looked appealing, but the pancakes were stodgy, the scrambled eggs were cold – and it was clear that I wasn’t the only glutton, there was a huge amount of food being wasted in the place.
I wouldn’t mind so much, but I’m normally pretty good with avoiding that type of waste. I’m the type of person who goes to the supermarket with a shopping list, I buy what I need, I freeze leftovers. We really don’t do food waste in our house. So what comes over me at the breakfast buffet?
Economists actually have an explanation for this. They have a saying: Unpriced resources will be wasted. That basically means that if we’re not paying for it, we’re not careful with it. We saw this in spectacular fashion years ago with the plastic bag levy. When it was introduced, plastic bag consumption dropped immediately by 93 per cent.
I thought of this, and the Right 2 Water campaign when I was listening to all the problems with water supply during the hot, dry weather. In case you don’t remember, the Right 2 Water campaign are against all water charges and metering. Their website says
Water charges will discriminate against working people and the unemployed in favour of the wealthy and are another regressive tax taking vital money out of the pockets of people and out of our economy. Our public water system is already paid for through general taxation which is progressive and we wish it to remain that way.
As I said, I like free stuff as much as the next person, and I don’t want an extra bill to pay any more than the next person either, but that whole campaign was totally wrong. It was based on the premise that paying a water bill was double taxation. That was nonsense to begin with. There is far more than one type of tax; we pay income tax, VAT, motor tax, inheritance tax, excise duty, stamp duty, property tax and that’s just some of the taxes paid by private individuals, to say nothing of the taxes that are paid by businesses, and passed on through pricing to their customers.
And, much as we might not like paying them, it’s right that there are lots of different types of taxes. If there weren’t, if all of our taxes were concentrated on just one or a couple of areas of the economy, that would distort economic activity, so it’s good economic practice to have our tax revenue come from a wide variety of sources; indeed, a major part of the economic crash can be blamed on the fact that government finances became over-dependent on taxation from one area, the building sector.
So this whole claim about double taxation really makes no sense.
And of course, nothing of value can truly be free. Like the food in the hotel, we do of course pay for our water, just not at the point of use. And not proportional to our use.
That has two bad effects. Firstly, like me pigging out in the hotel, there is no incentive to use water wisely. Remember, unpriced resources get wasted. People from the Right 2 Water campaign, when they are faced with this point, tend to puff out their chests and say how insulting it is to accuse decent Irish working people of wasting a valuable resource.
There are two problems with that. The first is that it’s obvious that there are huge variations in water use, and it’s clear that the richer you are, the more water you use. The Irish Times reported that richer areas such as Dublin 6 use an average of 488 litres per person per day, while the working-class people in Dublin 20 average 290 litres per day.
But those are both huge areas, so the measurement isn’t very fine-grained. Daily usage in Dublin 6 averages at 488 litres, so half the people use more than that, for certain some use much more. And 290 is the average in Dublin 20, so half of the people there use less than that, and some for sure use far less.
How can I be so sure? Because the average person in the UK, where water use is universally metered, is 150 litres per day – barely half the amount the average person uses in the lowest use area of Dublin – and the average use in the UK is less than one third of the average use in Dublin 6. So it is clear that people in the UK respond to incentives – and many people in Ireland respond to the lack of an incentive.
When water is short, no doubt some people do the public-spirited thing and voluntarily cut back their use. Some people turn off the tap when they are brushing their teeth, some people don’t run the tap before they get a glass of water, some people don’t run the dishwasher unless it’s full.
And some people go to Lidl and buy plastic swimming pools that take more water to fill in one day than other families use in months.
It’s not fair that the thrifty should have to pay for the profligacy of others, especially when the profligate are, in general, richer than the thrifty. Right 2 Water’s claim that water charges are an anti-progressive charge is not alone not correct, it is exactly the reverse of the truth.
And as I said, there is a second reason why making water free is a bad idea. Not only do the customers not value it, the supplier isn’t too careful with it either. We lose half of our water supply – half – through leaks. Irish water inherited their system from the local authorities, and they are only slowly, very, very slowly getting around to fixing any of that. And why should they? It makes no difference to them if the water gets to the customers or not. If that was electricity, or any other commodity that is priced in the market, then I suspect that they would display far more urgency. It’s not only the customers that react to financial incentives, the suppliers do as well.
And it’s not just leaks. Luke Ming Flanagan famously presented the then Taoiseach with a stinking brown liquid that came from the taps of some of his constituents. If any other supplier didn’t supply an acceptable product, you could at the very least refuse to pay the bill. But when the bill is just stuck onto general taxation, the supplier has little reason to get concerned.
The financial transaction between a customer and a supplier fundamentally changes the power relationship – remember that saying about if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product? That doesn’t just apply on the internet.
But it’s true that water is a very basic commodity. People who say that you can’t treat people’s water supply like baked beans or lawnmower widgets are right. There is no prospect of any competition the water supply, and cutting off the water of someone who couldn’t afford their bill would be a devastating and disproportionate punishment to people already likely not to be well off.
But that doesn’t mean we should give a free unlimited supply of pure drinking water to everyone in the country to drink and wash with, to wash their cars with, to water their lawns with and to fill their swimming pools with. We can’t, and even if we could, we shouldn’t. A supply of food is just as important as a supply of water, but nobody argues that food should be given away for free to all.
It is not beyond the capability of our republic to have an effective, fair water metering and billing system. Effective means that it funds the upkeep and repair that the water system needs, and disciplines both user and supplier to prevent waste and maintain a good supply.
Fair means that people pay proportional to their use, and that nobody is faced with a risk of their water supply being cut off. It shouldn’t be difficult to figure out an allowance for the basic needs of a household – enough for drinking, cleaning and washing.
Set that amount as an allowance to be paid for out of general taxation, and allow users who want to use more – to water their lawns, wash their cars or to fill their plastic Lidl swimming pools – let them do it, and let them pay for it. There’s plenty of water in the system, and that funding can go towards fixing the pipes so that it actually reaches the consumers.
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Also, Right 2 Water make a good point that a water billing system could well be a preparation for privatising the system as per the model in England and Wales. That has had very poor outcomes, and there is no reason to think that it would do any better here. And then there’s the basic point that the water in our rivers or in water tables under our feet is an extraordinary thing to sell off to a company that can be taken over, and run as a monopoly for the profit of shareholders in Wall Street or Shanghai or wherever.
That doesn’t mean that there can be no private sector involvement. I don’t see any reason why a private company couldn’t bid to service the system. The KPIs, the measurement of how well they do are pretty easy to measure – how quickly repairs are done, how much water leaks from the system, and the quality of the water itself. Private sector management is generally more efficient and there is no need to sell off the assets of the system to benefit from that.
I’m not totally convinced of the idea of a constitutional amendment to prevent privatising the system, but whatever needs to be done to prevent that happening is certainly a good idea.
