"Green" policies are destroying this country

Yea same with LPT and street cleaning and if these new water charges had been implemented to pay for public water delivery would this have resulted in a commensurate reduction in general taxation heretofore used to pay for this service?

Anyway this is off topic so Ill leave it there

I noticed SF wants a €3,000 take off tax on private jets. Imagine the wailing in the departures lounge at Weston Airport if that were to happen. 😲

Budget 2024 Ireland: Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman pushing for 25pc cut in childcare fees as Sinn Féin publishes alternative budget | Independent.ie

I read the Irish Water white paper at the time when they were thinking of putting in water charges. Coming from Holland where the water quality is very good i was looking at water quality levels. The paper basically said nothing about it only that you wouldnt get ill from it! I was immediately reassured..😄

The council decide if they want to discount the amount. They then send you the revised bill.

Bear in mind that the payment from every third house in Dublin goes 100% out of the county.

LPT should stay in the county of origin and if the rural counties cant pay for themselves, the shortfall should be funded by central govt, not by the people of Dublin.

You probably do not get the irony. I am used to having a certain quality of service, especially when i am paying for it. Standards in Holland are high. In Ireland they usually are not or much less. Certainly the drinking water. Just foul. So, if a company is taking over a service and wants the customer to pay for it you expect a certain level of quality. In the case of drinking water i not only expect a proper baseline without particulates that would make you ill but also something that actually tastes good or good enough. Since there was NO mention of the actual water quality in the white paper and only a reference to the absense of poorly defined ill making substances it seems reasonable to consider that a poor deal or even no deal at all. And anyway, the standard drinking water should already be sufficient to not make you ill even IF you don't pay for it through separate water charges. I thought the white paper from Irish Water was ridiculous and ready to be mocked.

That's all..

Don't know about that electricity one. I've paid nearly 2.5k to them this year to connect me and the pole I'm being wired to is ~80ft to the meter box, outside my garage.

Uisce Eireann also want a couple of grand to connect a pipe to the water line running by my front gate.

Ah cmon the city folk wouldn't be avle to enjoy their trips to visit the simple country folk if they didn't have electricity..well worth it at double the cost😂

That has always been the argument for a state to own the infrastructure and let providers compete on delivery. As soon as you outsource the whole system the best performing will create the highest profits for companies and they usually cut unprofitable ones like in the case of bus routes. The state should play a role in levelling, balancing services because the public has a basic right to them. It is part of the subsidiary principle. Therefore transport and especially energy systems should be to some extend controlled by the state. The question is: where are the boundaries, and what are the terms and conditions?

In the case of wind energy it seems it is heavily biased towards the big companies and that checks and balances have been thrown overboard due to climate change panic. It is as if the public is no longer entitled to checks and balances. It is mostly outsourced. Plus, if the state keeps the grid in public hands the wind energy providers will put extra stress on it. Why don't we start by making them pay the cost of upgrading the grid? The opposite is happening. They create the profits and the public pays for the grid costs.

It is even worse for solar energy.

Rishi Sunak, Britain's Tory prime minister, seems to have bravely adopted at least some of that mission by challenging Britain's radical climate agenda. It's a lesson for the United States.

Addressing Britain's sanguine climate policy, Mr. Sunak said, "there’s nothing ambitious about simply asserting a goal for a short-term headline without being honest with the public about the tough choices and sacrifices involved and without any meaningful democratic debate about how we get there."

Mind you, Mr. Sunak isn't what the climate cult types call a "climate change denier"; far from it. But he understands that aspirations without means are merely pipe dreams. And he also understands that imposing climate mandates without public discourse or debate is antithetical to the democratic principles that underlie his republic, as they do ours.

The article is a bit weak. However, i see the recent Sunak move as a typical politician's shift. Rather opportunistic but not uncommon. The big win is that it highlights both a general changing stand on climate change measures as doubt creeps in and a willingness to face the facts. Ir is contagious. Although the UK has tied itself to the Green Agenda and made laws to implement it, it no longer has the EU towering overhead to punish them. The advantage of Brexit is that subsequent governments are able to change laws.Wee Ireland will have to comply. That is the bad news. The good news is that the bigger countries are now in trouble. The main political parties are under threat. It is almost an iron law: wee countries comply, big countries bend and break laws.

In other words - all else being equal:

• renewables at the input - great success, can't fail
• nuclear at the input - absolutely no way, can't succeed

and if you dare suggest otherwise you are a climate change denier.

Rinse and Repeat.