EVERY year I get a bill for £50 odd in respect of water charges. Every year it causes me to develop a fleeting but profound resentment at the unfairness of taxation, of life and everything. Every year I until the last possible moment, usually after several repeat demands, before paying up without a smile.
This tells me that I am least willing to pay for those things I have most come to take for granted even when what is in question is among the elements most essential to my survival.
Scrutinising the most recent demand note last week, I found myself thinking about, of all things, the result of the Dublin West by election, earlier this year. You will recall how the radical independent Joe Higgins came within a handful of votes of taking the seat on the platform of opposition to water charges.
You may recall also that the Federation of Dublin Anti Water Charges Campaigns recently announced that it intends to field candidates in as many Dublin constituencies as possible in the next general election.
I am aware that the subtext of all this is to do with double taxation, and that there are the additional matters of unfair assessment and inequitable levies. But it is interesting that water is the issue that has most excited public opinion.
There is a cultural assumption in this country that the water supply is limitless and infinitely pure. But every other day now, you can read a story in the newspapers about the damage being done to Irish water by pollution of various kinds. Only last week, there were reports of yet another western lake, Lough Cullin in Co Mayo, being threatened by pollution generated enrichment
The other week, we had the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reporting that a significant number of drinking water supplies in the Republic are now "unfit for human consumption". The week before that, we learned that six of our beaches had lost their Blue Flags, indicating deteriorating water quality.
Fish kills are now an almost weekly occurrence, the latest major incident involving the death of more than 3,000 brown trout and salmon in the River Martin in Co Cork. A recent EPA report described as "catastrophic" the decline in the number of sea trout in Irish waters and called for the introduction of measures to protect salmon, particularly spring salmon.
Two facts provide a collision of irony. One, that the state of Irish water is approaching crisis point. Secondly, that the Irish electorate appears poised to mobilise itself as perhaps never before in refusing to accept charges in respect of a water supply which is in an advancing state of deterioration.
There is a paradox here: our right to something as essential as water should not be determined by our ability to pay, but how else can we protect what is clearly not an infinitely renewable resource from our seemingly congenital tendency to take our most basic needs for granted?
Economics tell us that we get what we pay for. This is a falsehood. We pay for what we must the rest we assume comes without cost. We pay for our car and mortgage, but would be outraged at the idea that we might have to pay for a sunset or the smell of a footpath after new rain.
Modern economic calculus treats the Earth, the environment, human culture and the well being of future generations as free resources with little or no place in current calculations. Most of our economic transactions involve borrowings from the natural entitlements of future generations which we make no provision to repay.
It is one thing to platitudinously observe that "we do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children", and quite another to give such rhetoric real weight in the formulae which govern our existence.
But the curious irony is that, the more damage we do to one of these "free" resources, the closer it comes to incorporation in the paying economy. The less drinkable water becomes, the more we will pay for it. Our parents, just 30 years ago, would have laughed themselves dizzy at the notion of having to pay £1 for a half pint of bottled water. And yet this has moved from absurdity to commonplace reality in just a generation.
BECAUSE we came from water, the absurdity is potentially deadly. We are talking about life itself, and the extent to which absurd thinking now threatens it. When multi cellular organisms first began to develop the process of taking in, retaining and excreting water, the circulatory process that became the engine of humanity was begun.
Life existed in water for two billion years before it came on to land, and more than 70 per cent of our bodies is water.
In the terrifyingly beautiful image of the environmental writer Father Sean McDonagh, "If our waters are toxic, our tears become toxic, and the wombs that produce the future generations of human life become toxic as well".
And so, what we should learn from the ironic collision between our resistance to paying for water and its concomitant deterioration is that it is time we started to make connections.
What is important about what is happening isn't fundamentally to do with politics, or economics, or even double taxation. Our capacity to get steamed up about having to pay for water, while turning a blind eye to the possibility that we may soon have lost the water we now take for granted, is evidence of a potentially fatal fragmentation of thinking.
In the religious tradition to which most of us profess allegiance, the central symbol of initiation is clean, life giving water. Every week of the year, ceremonies take place in which water is poured on the new born members of our faith and race as a reminder of the power of the natural elements which sustain our very lifeforce. In today's Ireland, the water used to baptise our children is more likely than not to be itself toxic.
Where are the voices to remind us of the meaning of this ritual and of its modern day corruption? And who is going to remind us of the other, more immediate, connections we need to make?
The Minister for the Environment can acknowledge that modern agricultural practices arising from the CAP are among "the chief threats to landscape and wildlife". And yet, this statement, made in the compartmentalised context of the environmentally conscious arena, appears to have little or no currency in the external world.
Not only is this insight never brought to bear in any real effort to alter the nature of the practices mentioned, but anyone who raises it in such a context is dismissed as either an anti European crank or an anti enterprise busybody.
The "assimilative" capacity" of the Irish landscape, used as a bait for foreign industrial polluters for many years, has gone into the red. The effects of industrial and agricultural policies over three decades are now registering in the degradation of the Irish landscape, lakes and rivers.
There is no point in us shedding toxic tears into our Ballygowans. Instead of protesting about water charges, we might be better employed pondering their ominous meaning. It is time we started to make the right connections about water.