Uisce Eireann has defended providing a hotline that people can use to report ‘non-essential’ water use during the current hosepipe ban.

A spokesperson was at pains to stress that they wanted to avoid neighbourhood disputes arising from this snitches’ charter. 

The idea was, instead, to take as many measures as possible to protect water for ‘essential purposes’, she said.

We should be mindful of how we use water at all times of the year, and those ugly power-washers wheeled out at weekends betray the selfishness of people who think their eight-year-old estate needs several minutes of sustained saturation, irrespective of waste.

It’s even more selfish in the throes of a heatwave, and it’s difficult not to think anyone reported by a neighbour in the coming weeks didn’t have it coming.

But carelessness and selfishness are inevitable when people are getting water for free – or, to be precise, think that they are.

Because in the absence of water charges here, the Exchequer – i.e. the taxes paid by you and me – picks up the tab. And it’s a monumental one in a country whose water infrastructure is in many places crumbling.

A funding package of almost €14billion was approved for Uisce Éireann in May to pay for major projects up to 2029.

Business is braced for an increase in water charges to help pay for this, with their share of the cost expected to be up to €2.5billion.

The householders’ portion is nearly €7.5billion – and that’s paid for by the State.

That, of course, is the same as you and me; just because a bill isn’t dropping into an inbox or onto a hallway mat doesn’t mean you are not being charged.

A separate request for more funding from Uisce Éireann is expected later in the year, to pay for measures that it’s claimed will help to tackle chronic housing shortages.

That will come to many more billions, because the provision of water costs a fortune, especially with infrastructure in need of a complete upgrade. How we pay for this should be up for discussion, but think on.

There is more chance of revisiting seminal moments in modern Ireland like the legalisation of divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion than reopening water charges as a topic of public discussion.

In the Ireland of 2026, water is one of the last taboos. Resisting the introduction of charges endures as a triumph for the left – and, in particular, the radical left. 

It was a post-crash measure whose implementation was botched by the governments of Enda Kenny, with Phil Hogan an injudicious salesman for a measure that was contentious in a country that was broke and sore.

The failure to bring in charges is an ineradicable stain on otherwise sensible administrations that oversaw the stabilisation of Ireland’s sorry finances.

But it was the inability to sell the idea to people that was at the heart of the failure.

Hogan’s infamous warning that supply would be reduced to a trickle if people didn’t pay was manna for the far left, who thrived by exploiting the fear and frustration of frightened taxpayers. 

Those mistakes resound to this day, because there would be no need for an informers’ hotline if every household was metered, and the relationship between waste and cost was obvious at the point of use.

The chap across the road would be less inclined to wash gallons of soapy water out on to the footpath if he had to account for them. Instead, we use as we please, we grouse when the water pressure drops at night, and too many of us fail to understand that we end up footing the bill for it all anyway.

Perhaps the only notice more irritating than one about curtailed water supply is one advising you that the electricity is going to be down for the day.

But if our energy infrastructure raises concerns about future demands, the plants and pipes that treat and supply our water are a cause for much greater anxiety. 

News that a mains pipe has burst means hours without supply, but it also makes you wonder if they’ll call in engineers or archaeologists, so ancient are some of the structures supplying our homes.

There is no coherent argument against water charges; there never has been.

The claim that water is a human right ignores the cost involved in its provision and the concomitant requirement on the public to use it responsibly.

The other argument made by opponents relied on scaremongering, and the claim that Uisce Éireann could one day be privatised.

Given the disaster that privatisation has meant for water supply in UK, it was a powerful claim – but as far as we know, a groundless one, too.

Waste costs us billions every year between leaks and the environmental impact, yet the regard for nature that is supposed to be a sacred tenet of the left is conveniently overlooked when it comes to water.

Yet despite the refusal of any stripe of political persuasion to acknowledge as much, water charges must eventually come back on the agenda.

Because reality cannot be gainsaid forever.