**ALL THINGS IRISH WATER/WATER RELATED** Part 2 - MOD WARNING IN OP

To go back to things like Irish Water, and the political structure of Ireland.

Another idea that was gelling as I was walking up to the village this morning.

We at present have 26 county managers and local authorities, the managers alone cost nearly €4Million per year, and that's without expenses, allowance and pension costs, and they employ somewhere in the region of 32,000 staff. On the basis of having to do some calculation, a 9,000 reduction in recent years has saved some €300M, on that basis, the costs of the remaining 32,00 are costing close on €1bn per annum.

Now, Birmingham Metropolitan authority in the UK looks after a population of 3.6 Million, with a staff that's being reduced to somewhere around 6,000. The Chief executive of Birmingham is earning somewhere between £180 and 220K per annum,

Allowances have to be made for the fact that Ireland is geographically larger than Birmingham, but the reality is that we could (should) change the system in Ireland, and save significant sums.

My suggestion would be that in order to save howls of protest from every county, we replace the county councils with Regional councils, so there would be a Leinster, Munster and Connaught regional council, with the another for the Dublin metropolitan area. That might cause problems with Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan, which historically are part of the province of Ulster, as 300,000 is not really large enough to justify a separate authority in terms of economy.

We already know that the merge of 26 local authorities water staff into IW has meant that there are 2500 people in IW with no work to do, extrapolating based on reports given to Dail answers. 10,000 out of 30,000 at local authority level is a saving of somewhere around €300M per annum, and there would be significant savings on the costs of operating things like local offices and the like, we've all seen the massive office complexes that local authorities have moved into in recent years, they cost big bucks in terms of heating and lighting, and if the local authority don't own the building, the least costs are significant.

So, rather than a Meath Library service, and a Louth Library service, etc, we'd have a Leinster Library service and who knows, with the economy of scale, we might even see some other savings as a result of the better purchasing power that the larger organisations would have. In some respects, some services like Libraries would almost be better as a nationally managed service, given the size of the systems involved. My point is that with the way things are now, NOTHING should be regarded as sacred, or untouchable.

Yes, we'd still need local councillors, and the precise structure of how things like planning would operate would need to be looked at in a bit more detail.

The main and most important aspect of all of this is that we have become over governed, with too many people sucking huge sums of money out of the the national trough, with no real justification for that level of cost, and it's become a self perpetuating money go round system that is designed to take care of a select few, and damn the consequences, or the cost.

We can't afford this any more, the bills we are being expected to pay have become excessive and unmanageable, and action to prevent the waste of money being spent on these excesses is long overdue. In the days of the horse and cart, when travel over any distance was a problem, locally based services were appropriate, and needed, but with the way things have changed, at the extreme, we no longer need an expensive local authority structure with massive costs for a county with a population of 31,000. The County manager alone in Leitrim is costing EACH person in the county €5 a year, by the time you add all the other top level jobs, the figures become crazy, but no voices have been raised on these issues until now, because it's suited the political elite not to raise these issues, it protects their own isolationism.

There are many services and systems that can be dealt with on line, if the will is there, and it will not be difficult to make access to those services available at places like libraries, or other places, even things like citizens advice centres, with assistance available to people who either don't have a computer, or who are not computer literate. The Post Office network has computer links, so why not facilitate services through a dedicated terminal in a post office?

In the same vein, the UK no longer issues motor tax discs to display on the windscreen, it's managed centrally on computer, and police and other services that need access to the information can get it. If the UK, with a population of 60 plus million can make that sort of change, why can't we?

We can't afford the total cost of state services any more, and there are many ways in which the cost could be significantly reduced without reducing the effectiveness of the service given.

When you start looking, it's easy to see how and why the IMF made the comments they did about the cost of state services in Ireland. Our counties are still based on the old judicial county boundaries that go back to before the 1850's, and that would have been based on how far a judge could travel on a horse, and we're still tied to that system.

It really is time we embraced the 21st century.

Barely There wrote: »

Yes, and many died of water-borne diseases. Many still do. You should educate yourself before you post such guff.


You also have a fundamental mis-understanding of the kind of natural treatment process that water undergoes before being drunk by people, even in the developing world where formal treatment process may be lacking.

Drinking water direct from a roof, via a gutter into a trough will make you very, very ill. It may even kill you.

Silly boy.

Satriale wrote: »

Do you think resorting to condescension bolsters your argument?

I'd give you a 100 to 1 that if you were in the desert for a half a day and I handed you a glass of p1ss you'd snap my hand off, never mind rain water. Go way outa that sunshine.:D

And I'll give you 100 to 1 that you both have water to a tap, and some form of system for treating the waste that goes out of the house. In an urban area, to avoid epidemic diseases, the output has to be treated, and for safety, the incoming water also needs to be treated. That has to be paid for one way or another, the decision was made that the payment should be on the basis of usage going forward, as that is fairer than the old system. Not hard really.