WSM - Defeating the water charges - READ OUR WATER CHARGES FAQ AT wsm.ie/water-charge-faq

Don’t be fooled by the concessions.---- In the face of massive opposition to the water 
charges, the government have made several clumsy attempts to placate us, while their 
partners in the media seek to frighten us off the streets. The latest attempt, delivered 
by Alan Kelly, Minister for the Environment, Community & Local Government in the Dáil on 
the 19th of November, is the plan to charge us €160 per year for our water and to give 
‘eligible households’ a water conservation grant of €100.

These allegedly ‘very attractive’ and ‘reasonable’ double charges for our water remain the 
real issue, despite government claims that there has just been a ‘communications failure’. 
That is, they think the problem is that they didn’t soften us up with enough propaganda 
first, not that we simply won’t accept double charges, commodification and privatisation 
of our water supply. The government will promise us anything and everything in order to 
get us to lie down and accept these charges, including the laughable claim that if we use 
a low enough volume of water that we’ll each actually make money off the water charges! 
Rest assured that any temporary and limited reductions in charges from the figure they 
initially stated will be swiftly removed if we were to pay up come April. Though, with the 
credibility of the Irish political class at an all time low, no one is buying the lies the 
government are selling. Even a concerted media onslaught has failed to scare people off 
the streets and into silence.

It’s worth noting that the reason that the Fine Gael/Labour government is throwing 
concessions at us is because of the scale and militancy of the anti water charge protests, 
rather than because of the actions of any government party. It is above all ordinary 
people, who perhaps have never considered themselves political before, who have stopped 
the government in its tracks. The democratic self-organisation that underpins the recent 
protests is what the State really fears. The reason the media have been foaming at the 
mouth, condemning militant working class protest is because the system can handle a few 
dissenting voices elected to the Dáil but it cannot handle a risen population.

Even as Denis O’Brien’s media machine tries to scare us, and the government parties 
attempt to divide and conquer, we must continue to educate ourselves, to organise and to 
protest the water charges at every turn. Protests, marches and pickets on the current 
scale are impossible to ignore and are putting politicians under serious pressure to 
comply with our demands. If we keep it up, we will see off this latest attempt at 
squeezing more money out of our already struggling communities.

wsm.ie/water-charge-faq

Garda brutality, from Rossport to Dublin.

Scenes of Garda violence against water charge resistors have come
as a shock to many people. If this had happened 10 years ago most
people elsewhere might only have heard rumours and assumed that
something must have been done to deserve the response. Today
however, the prevalence of camera phones and the ease of sharing
photos and video on Facebook has meant one video after another
showing disproportionate violence from the Gardaí has ‘gone viral’
and made it very hard to conceal.

By the weekend when water charge resistors surrounded Joan Bur-
ton’s car in Jobstown, the level of Garda violence captured on video
looked a lot like the video’s coming our of Rossport in 2007-9. This
was seen most strikingly outside the Mansion House where 3 Gardaí
threw a woman into a metal bollard with considerable force. That same week the media 
changed its reporting angle on the water charge resistance from a sometimes sympathetic 
‘they have a point’ approach to a series of hostile smears.

As with the Rossport protests of 2007 a number of stories were published suggesting that 
the protests were controlled by a ‘sinister fringe’ and included ‘dissident republicans’ 
determined to bring down the state. As with Rossport while incidents of Garda violence 
against protesters were downplayed, explained away or simply ignored, the few instances 
where someone snapped and fought back were magnified out of all proportion. The Jobstown 
brick which bounced harmlessly off a Garda car was turned into a major news story. In both 
cases this is done to create a false division into ‘good protesters’ and ‘bad protesters’ 
to weaken the resolve of those resisting.

The struggle against Shell in Rossport involved a community of a couple of hundred people 
subjected to years of such intimidation. Their resistance taught Shell a lesson, the 
project that was meant to cost 600 million and be finished in five years is still not 
completed and will cost over 3.4 billion. That project was imposed through Garda violence, 
a hostile media and craven politicians working in the service of big business. Exactly the 
same range of forces that are imposing Irish Water and trying to destroy our resistance. 
But in Rossport they were beating down 200 people and their supporters, now they are 
trying the same tactics against hundreds of thousands. Obviously those tactics are not 
working this time and by staying united, we will win.

‘Conservation’ is a Lie.

The government tell us that water charges are being introduced
as a “conservation measure”. We are all very wasteful of a pre-
cious natural resource, so the narrative goes, and it’s only if it’s
metered and we are made to pay for it that we will be diverted
from our extravagant ways.

Enda Kenny and others have gone so far as to talk about ‘anec-
dotal evidence’ of people ‘leaving their taps running all night’.
While the ‘taps running all night’ claim is just blatant nonsense,
if the concern was actually about conservation of water, surely
it would have made far more sense to invest the €539 million
that is being spent on the installation of meters on fixing the
leaks in pipes. At any rate there is absolutely no evidence that
meters have an appreciable effect on people’s usage habits in
the medium to long term. The Commissioner for Energy Regu-
lation has recently released figures showing that the meters will only result in a 
reduction of approximately 22 litres a day for the average family – or the equivalent of 
one dishwasher cycle. This amounts to a usage reduction of just 6%.

Comparison with studies done in areas of Britain where meters were installed suggest that 
even this will be very much a short-term reduction and that in the longer term the saving 
will be more like 1.5%. When meters are initially installed, people are probably very 
careful with usage and this will lead to a short-term decrease in consumption. But when 
people get used to the metering and get fed up giving out to their teen-agers about the 
length of time they spend in the shower etc., they go back to similar usage patterns to 
pre-meter times. In Britain, meter installation has, in the long term, reduced water 
consumption by just 1.5%.


The ‘No consent, no contract’ argument.

The recent announcement that people who have returned their registration packs to Irish 
Water blank, or emblazoned with the words “No consent, no contract”, are now registered 
with the service provider, should be enough to expose the counter-legal mumbo jumbo being 
spread by Direct Democracy Ireland (DDI), and other groups influenced by the “Freeman of 
the land” ideology.

DDI’s advice, as illustrated by the fact that those who followed it are now registered, is 
nonsense. The authority to charge users of water comes from Section 21 Part 3 of the Water 
Services (No. 2) Act 2013, which says Irish Water “shall charge each customer for the 
provision of its water services in accordance with the approved water charge plan.” The 
entitlement to charge is not dependent upon a contract because section 2 of the act 
defines the customer as “the occupier of the premises in respect of which the water supply 
is provided.”

Contrary to the DDI/Freeman theory, there are no magic words that “provide an extra layer 
of legal protection” for water charge resistors. When we refuse to pay, we break the law. 
When we block meter installation, we break the law. These are the only tactics that can 
deliver victory, so if we are to win, the law must be broken. The law is not there to 
protect us, it is there to protect the power and wealth of those who rule us.

5 things you can do to set up your own campaign group.

1) Online Presence - A first step is to set up a local Facebook page. This can be used as 
a focal point for information about the group, and a way of raising awareness that the 
group exists. A group Twitter account is optional but not as important. Also set up a 
group email account.

2) Plan a Public Meeting - This could be a street meeting for your estate, or a larger 
meeting for the wider area.

3) Find a venue - Think of any local community centres, sports clubs, pubs, or even an 
outdoor space (as
some people have done). Ask attendees for small donations if you need to.

4) Try to get a couple speakers to speak for a few minutes at the beginning. Organisers 
from other local campaigns will be happy to speak, as will trade union and political 
activists, and even anti water charge politicians.

5) The next step is advertising the meeting. This can be done several ways: leaflets and 
posters, door-knocking, a Facebook ad, and word of mouth.

Hand out leaflets in key areas like shopping centres, and put up posters in areas of high 
traffic. Ask local shops and businesses if they will display some leaflets. Knock on doors 
of local people to tell them about the meeting and give them a leaflet (slow but 
effective). Post on the Facebook page advertising the meeting, and ‘boost’ that post as an 
advertisement for greater visibility (costs a few quid). Tell everyone you know to spread 
the word about the meeting.

After we win, what comes next?

The revolt against the water charges is of a size and militancy that if we stay on the 
streets we will certainly win. But the revolt has also exposed in plain view the level of 
co-operation between media, politicians, big businessmen like Denis O’Brien and the 
Gardaí. All have acted together to cajole, bully and suppress protest and then to lie and 
distort events. While we might defeat the water charges they come at the end of a long 
sequence of cuts in services and wages, a period of unemployment and emigration. All this 
takes place in a society where people are marginalised because of their gender, migration 
status, sexuality and whether they are settled or Traveller. Stepping back and looking at 
the whole picture, is this really the sort of society any of us would build for our 
children given a choice?

We don’t get to make that choice, we have never got to make that choice. Our ancestors may 
have won the right to vote but that has proven a fairly meaningless exercise where we only 
get to choose between parties that lie to us. They promise one thing and do the opposite 
when in power. Part of the reason for that being there isn’t actually much power in the 
Dail. What can be decided there is sharply limited by the dictatorship of the market, a 
dictatorship that saw the costs of the banking crisis being imposed on us despite the fact 
that in a referendum we would have voted no.

When we defeated the water charge in the 1990’s they simply waited a couple of decades and 
then tried to impose it again. That’s the way the system we live under works, even when we 
successfully resist one assault it looks for another way to make us pay. Which is why when 
we fight and win on single issues we also need to be thinking about creating a very 
different society and starting the process of organising for it.

The water charge resistors who produced this leaflet are anarchists. That means we want to 
replace this society of fear and greed that is divided into order givers and order takers 
with one where everyone, and not just the super rich, are free. Not just free in the sense 
of choosing to buy one phone rather than another but free of the fear of poverty removing 
our ability to live life as we choose, free of the way racism, sexism and homophobia shape 
our society into a grey, lifeless world where many cannot express their love or live their 
ambitions. Free of environmental degradation caused by the need for an endless, 
destructive economic growth that lines mainly the pockets of the rich.

Our vision is of a society where we can all come together as equals to collectively decide 
what our priorities are, what we will produce and how to create the space in which we all 
can live as we want. If that vision appeals to you and you want to organise with us let us 
know by registering at this link:
www.wsm.ie/user/register


READ OUR WATER CHARGES FAQ AT wsm.ie/water-charge-faq


Keep up to date on the fight against water charges and on the many other struggles 
happening at the moment, both nationally and internationally, by following us on Facebook 
at ‘Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland)’.

There are many local pages being set up or already established to help organise in our 
communities. Keep an eye out for local Facebook pages like ‘Dún Laoghaire’s Not Paying’ or 
‘Drogheda Anarchists’ to link up with like minded people in your locality. Together we can 
beat these double charges, build strong community organisations and ensure that we will 
never be seen as an easy target for austerity again.

www.wsm.ie