Step Away from the Soap - It's the Only Way to Afford a Water Meter

People don’t understand the Government, you know. Poor Michael Noonan makes a perfectly innocent remark about how water meters are good for us and the next thing you know he’s hauled over the coals in the Daily Mail like he’s a Jedward who’s been caught night-clubbing with some scrubber from TOWIE.

Poor Michael Noonan is, fundamentally, the misunderstood parent. His stern demeanour is only for our good. When the Government takes us down to the woodshed and whales us within an inch our lives, for not paying the household charge, say, we cannot see that it’s only for our good.

And it’s not just because of the tears in our eyes either – we just can’t seem to understand simple economics, or that every blow rained down by the Government hurts them much, much more than it hurts us. Sure we’ve broken bones, but haven’t they splinters from breaking the hurl? And splinters are really sore.

As it happens, An Spailpín fully endorses the Government’s plan to introduce water meters. It’s only fair that we have to pay for what we use. What should your correspondent subsidises some letter-writer to the Irish Times in squandering water by pouring it on his begonias or washing his Mercedes? Pay for what you use; it’s the Austerity Way.

This way, each citizen can pay his or her own part in #positiveireland’s path to recovery. We can all do our bit. We can stop washing for a start – sure what are baths anyway, only the decadent luxury of some foreign Jezebel, like herself up in the picture? Sure aren’t we fine as we are?

A college friend of the blog read a lot of Chompsky back in the day. He figured out that washing – prevalent in the Western World – was simply dull-witted submission to a power structure implemented and controlled by multinational corporations such as Unilever and the like. We only showered ever day because we saw it on television, and what were those television shows only imperialist American propaganda? When you think about it, you quickly realise that the American climate is much warmer than the Irish. Therefore, Yanks sweat more, and have to shower more often. In Ireland we sweat less. Any Irish person will be grand with a splash every second week or so. Less in winter.

This is the sort of positive thinking that will set Ireland back on her feet. Sure, it’ll be stuffy on the buses for a while and soap will replace skag as the contraband of choice on the streets of the capital but the nation has to realise that we’re living beyond our means. Ireland, Inc, has bills to pay.

You’ve probably heard about the banks already but there are lot of other bills and they all add up. Consider the Government Advisors. Their pay was originally capped at €92k but now it’s up to €120k, or thereabouts. Remember when the Cabinet went up to Áras an Uachtaráin to collect their seals of office in a minibus instead of the fleet of Mercs preferred by their profligate predecessors? See, it was an Advisor that thought that up.

Your ordinary hammerhead civil servant would never think of a good one like that, even if he took off his shoes and socks, the better for counting. Sure a man that can think of that is well worth a pay rise that’s greater than the average industrial wage. You have to pay what people are worth.

And what’s the average industrial wage anyway? Sure isn’t thirty grand only a pittance? The Thomas J O’Connell Branch put a motion before the Labour Party Conference last weekend suggesting that “no public service pension should exceed the average industrial wage.” And you know, they meant well. But there’s no great tradition of radical revolutionary socialism in Mayo, where the Thomas J O’Connell branch is located, and the craythurs didn’t understand the sheer human suffering that the proper, Sandymount, Labour Party must fight every day. So there’s a commitment to a cap of sixty grand in the Program of Government, and maybe that’ll happen once they pass this fiscal referendum and euthanize the Seanad. Maybe.

In the meantime, the little people must do their bit to ensure that the country can get back to being “the best little country in the world to do business.” So put down that bar of soap, and forget about that bath ‘til Mayday. Sure in this current cold weather we’re hardly sweating at all.