"THE Government is to attempt to stem the rural revolt on water charges by providing free domestic water to every household in the State," ran the opening paragraph of a story in this newspaper last Monday headlined "Coalition plan to buy off, protest over water charges.
When the communists won power in Nepal a couple of years ago, they did so on the promise of a free car for every family. Ridiculous? No more ridiculous than the belief that water is free.
It is not free, and never has been for all but the fortunate dwellers beside lakes, streams and wells. For most of our tenancy on this planet, we were able to stray away from natural sources of water for only a limited time. The growth of civilisation has always been related to our ability to harness water.
The development of organised literate societies began in the alluvial gardens of Mesopotamia, where the very deed of controlling water movements and taming tide and flood obliged early man to construct vaster and more dynamic social groupings than had ever existed before. This required capital and planning, concepts foreign to the hunter gatherers who had preceded them.
The mastery of water is one of the great obstacles in the development of mankind. Those who do not master its Eskimo Aborigine, Amazonian Indian, Plains Indian - are doomed to roam in small familial gangs looking for food or are marooned beside the river bank. Those that master water go on to create cities, literacy, laws.
Skilled slaves
The greatest achievement of the Romans was the aquaduct, bringing water from where it was to where it was not. Huge capital investment was required, to make this possible engineers had to be trained and vast armies of skilled slaves deployed to translate the plan into reality. And when the water supplies to the cities failed and were not repaired, the cities died.
As it was, so it is. The cities of western Europe almost all began on rivers but were only able to grow from being large towns with the construction of vast water projects - reservoirs, rechannelled rivers and networks of wells. But these wells were too easily contaminated by human effluent so that the citizens of Europe's cities came to depend on piped water.
In the absence of piped water, they supped well water and were regularly treated to typhus and other interesting population controls.
Why are we able to have big cities? Because we have managed cater. Dublin could grow because the State invested huge resources in sucking water from the Liffey and from reservoirs in Co Wicklow, cleaning it and piping it to the city's residents.
In terms of capital investment, it dwarfs any other industrial project in this island's history. It was considered so vast an undertaking as to be achievable by government only; and because it was by government, the pernicious fiction began that it was free.
It was not and is not. Nothing that government does is free. It is paid for by us but the habit of believing in cargo cult water, that it arrives, without cost, through our taps, was an agreeable political fiction turned into a fiscal nightmare by the most immoral election pledge in the history of the State, Fianna Fail's promise to abolish local government rates in 1977.
From then on, water appeared to be without cost - and we have been using it without regard to cost ever since.
Certain truth
The issue of water charges is erupting now, with promises of "free" water even as the reservoirs above Dublin become nearly empty and the pipes through the city lose 50 per cent of the water which they carry. And no one in political life dare state the obvious and certain truth - that it is time to meter water and charge by consumption.
Only that way will we respect it and understand that it is a scarce resource and an expensive one. While it appears to be free, it is squandered and vast amounts of national wealth dissipated.
God help the politician who stands up and proposes such a measure. Statism has so permeated popular political culture that anybody who seeks re election on a platform of a realistic attitude towards water, with metered outlets and the economic disciplines of the market place, might as well sign on in Werburgh Street now.
The proximity of the election even induces the freemarketeers of the PDs to promise water, water everywhere, and all of it for free.
Water should be like coal, oil or any other commodity. If I supply my own, through my own well or in a group well, there is no reason why I should pay for other people's consumption of it. If I tap into a water network, much as I do for electricity or gas, I should pay for what I use and thereby aid reinvestment in the mains system.
The big question, the question which nobody dares tackle as election time comes is: who is to pay for the recapitalisation of the Dublin water system? How will we raise the money for it? More taxes? Or by a sane long term water policy based on economic realities, rather than the wishful piety that water gushes without cost?
Little schemes
This brings us to the next question: is the management of water to be handled from now by the State - it has been so splendidly efficient in so many of its little schemes, the restoration of the Irish language; our road building programme, the TB eradication scheme; our transport policy (oh, you name you favourite failure); or by the system of private enterprise which has caused us to have the fastest growing economy in Europe?
What fate awaits the politician who suggests the privatisation of water? Will it be possible even to discuss, this without resort to primitive taunts involving the term "Thatcherism" and the scandalously high salaries water bosses in Britain have awarded themselves? Probably not. Ah well.