The Irish Water debate, (or debacle perhaps?), just keeps on rolling.
The authors of the whole ruse are off on holidays for a while now to frantically wrack their brains for some way to kid us into accepting Irish Water in some fashion or other before the election. It needs to be re-parceled as something else because the EU and the voting public has rejected it as currently designed.
But they've built a trap for themselves. They cannot back down now because that would almost guarantee that Labour and Fine Gael will be wiped out in the election. Phil Hogan has certainly dug them a monstrous hole, hasn't he? People silly enough to have paid the first bill must be now planning to ignore the next one that falls through their letterboxes too. And the bribes sent out to entice us to pay up are by now, yesterday's breakfast, unvouched for of course.
I'd feel sorry for the Government politicians if they weren't such a shower of unmitigated pricks. They really are clueless liars drifting aimlessly in their own pomp and bullshit. They can never tell us the truth that we have been paying all along and Irish Water was set up to get us to pay on the double. They could never admit to us that all we were ever going to get was a metering and billing company because that's what I.W. actually is. The water is still being provided to us by the local authorities and their staff and it always will be. They couldn't possibly come clean now and say it was a ruse to fleece us. That could hurt their re-election prospects, the single thing they all went into to politics for in the first place.
So they have an urgent need to trick us again and they know they must get it right this time. They must be looking more closely at how Fianna Fail tricked us so successfully into voting a second time for the Lisbon Treaty after we had emphatically rejected it the first time. The 'soldiers of destiny' really do know how to cheat and get away with it, they must be thinking.
But what are the alternatives now, they are most surely be wondering. "We have tried the conservation angle and that was seen for the nonsense it always was. We're spreading dark rumors that Dublin could suffer huge water shortages and no-one seems to give a shit about that. The damned electorate didn't swallow the crap about creaking infrastructure problems in our Victorian piping. Nobody believes the line we spun about water being a precious commodity 'cause it's pissed down on their heads free of charge all summer. So just what big lie can we come up with to fool the voters when we get back from holidays?"
I'd love to be a fly on the wall at some of these think-tanks. I am imagining eager your candidates putting their hands up urgently to speak. "Why don't we re-name it Irish Water (Diluted) Ltd sir?" one will cry. "We could turn the whole thing off for a month and see how they like that sir?" another more militant voice could say. "Can't we make non-payment an automatic custodial sentence sir?" a legal type might offer. "How about trebling the motor tax sir?" the village idiot then suggests. "Or we could send in the army sir, that always works?" A seasoned player might then stand up and offer, "I suggest that we defer any decisions until we get five more years under our belts from them, then we'll make them pay for this embarrassment," to cries of here, here!
One way or another, it isn't over yet and believe me, it is us versus them now, make no mistake.