In a statement, the People Before Profit Alliance (PBPA) has said that systematic failure on the part of the government to invest in upgrading the water infrastructure, despite knowledge of its perilous condition, is the real reason that the water system has been plunged into crisis by recent weather conditions.
PBPA said the government have been fully aware over recent years of the need to urgently replace water mains across the country with modern and more robust piping and to increase reservoir capacity but had simply failed to provide the resources to do this.
Cllr Richard Boyd Barrett said: “The massive hardship now being experienced by hundreds of thousands of people – particularly families with children and the elderly – is not the unfortunate result of extreme weather conditions; it is the result of systemic government failure.
The government are dishonestly suggesting that the current water crisis is purely the result of freak weather conditions or because of householders irresponsibly running taps. This is pure hypocrisy and dishonesty.
In reality, the harsh weather conditions have simply exposed the utterly decrepit and inadequate state of the country’s water infrastructure and the government’s own failure to remedy this major infrastructural deficit.
Local authorities and engineers dealing with the water system have long flagged the perilous state of our infrastructure and the need to invest in remedial action urgently. Even before this crisis, it was well known that there was massive leakage from water mains because the pipes were so old and that there was a severe shortage of reservoir capacity. The government have continuously ignored calls to deal with this problem or paid lip service, while refusing to stump up the resources.
In the government’s pronouncements on the water crisis, we are seeing the same stunning hypocrisy that we saw with the banking and economic crisis. They want to shift the blame on to everyone and everything except themselves.
With the banking crisis, they blamed the international downturn and claimed we were “all to blame”, when, in reality, it was because they allowed bankers and developers run amok.
Now with the water crisis they try to blame the weather and ordinary citizens for failing to conserve water, when, in fact, it is the government’s own failure to invest in vital infrastructure.
The fact is that our water system has been operating on such a knife edge for many years now and that any sort of exceptional event was guaranteed to plunge it into crisis. It was an accident waiting to happen.
And as with the economic crisis, there is the same root cause: the benefits of the Celtic Tiger were poured into the pockets of bankers, developers and wealthy elites, instead of being invested in the vital services and infrastructure. We are now paying the price for their greed driven priorities.
Once again, ordinary people are paying the price for the bankruptcy of Fianna Fail policies over more than a decade and their criminal squandering of the unprecedented wealth generated over that period.
The suffering being experienced by ordinary people across the country, who now lack the most basic resource – water – is yet another reason to finally drive this government out of office.”
For more info/confirmation contact Richard Boyd Barrett 087-6329511
The government are dishonestly suggesting that the current water crisis is purely the result of freak weather conditions or because of householders irresponsibly running taps. This is pure hypocrisy and dishonesty.
In reality, the harsh weather conditions have simply exposed the utterly decrepit and inadequate state of the country’s water infrastructure and the government’s own failure to remedy this major infrastructural deficit.
Local authorities and engineers dealing with the water system have long flagged the perilous state of our infrastructure and the need to invest in remedial action urgently. Even before this crisis, it was well known that there was massive leakage from water mains because the pipes were so old and that there was a severe shortage of reservoir capacity. The government have continuously ignored calls to deal with this problem or paid lip service, while refusing to stump up the resources.
In the government’s pronouncements on the water crisis, we are seeing the same stunning hypocrisy that we saw with the banking and economic crisis. They want to shift the blame on to everyone and everything except themselves.
With the banking crisis, they blamed the international downturn and claimed we were “all to blame”, when, in reality, it was because they allowed bankers and developers run amok.
Now with the water crisis they try to blame the weather and ordinary citizens for failing to conserve water, when, in fact, it is the government’s own failure to invest in vital infrastructure.
The fact is that our water system has been operating on such a knife edge for many years now and that any sort of exceptional event was guaranteed to plunge it into crisis. It was an accident waiting to happen.
And as with the economic crisis, there is the same root cause: the benefits of the Celtic Tiger were poured into the pockets of bankers, developers and wealthy elites, instead of being invested in the vital services and infrastructure. We are now paying the price for their greed driven priorities.
Once again, ordinary people are paying the price for the bankruptcy of Fianna Fail policies over more than a decade and their criminal squandering of the unprecedented wealth generated over that period.
The suffering being experienced by ordinary people across the country, who now lack the most basic resource – water – is yet another reason to finally drive this government out of office.”
For more info/confirmation contact Richard Boyd Barrett 087-6329511
