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35% OF PEOPLE have said they would pay water charges if they were brought in tomorrow.
According to an opinion poll carried out by Amarách Research for RTÉ’s Claire Byrne Live/TheJournal.ie, 55% of respondents agreed they would not pay for water charges if they were introduced in 2019.
A further 10% of people said they didn’t know if they would pay the charges now. There was little difference between men and women, with 5% more women than men saying they wouldn’t pay the charges now.
Different age groups disagreed on whether they would pay. 24% of those aged 18-24 said they would pay the charges, while nearly half of those aged 55 and up said they would be willing to pay.
In terms of geography, 31% of people from Dublin were in favour of paying the charges but in the rest of Leinster, this figure was 37%.
Domestic water charges were introduced in Ireland in 2014 on a consumption-based charging system, but for many people in the country they were the norm until they were scrapped in 1997.
The average charge per household would be around €240 a year, Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan announced in May 2014. By October that year, opposition to the charges had grown and around 50,000 people marched against them in Dublin.
In November, a large crowd gathered at the now-renowned Jobstown protest in which Joan Burton (Tánaiste at the time) was trapped in her car for over two hours by the protesters.
That month, the new Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly said on RTÉ’s Six One news that legislation for the charges was “rushed through the Dáil” which shouldn’t have happened.
The charges were suspended in 2016 and a parliamentary committee further recommended that they be abolished.
61% of people paid their water charges at the end of the third billing cycle (six-month period), Irish Water said in January 2016. 44% paid at the end of the first period and 55% at the end of the second.
Recently, two large-scale boil water notices in the Greater Dublin Area were issued due to problems with heavy rain and the disinfection process for drinking water at the Leixlip Water Treatment Plant.
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No one seems interested in the basic function of farming, creating food.!Any suggestions on what we should eat when all the rewilding is complete!
@Tommy Lennon: Nearly all the food we produce is exported though, so rewilding vast swathes of land wouldn’t affect our access to food.
@Tommy Lennon: Heather!! This hogwash is really going overboard. 5.2 Million people have to eat something!!
Few years ago they couldn’t give away enough money to reclaim land, bogs were drained, ditches bulldozed to make fields bigger now give more money to put it back, what next
@Andy Murphy: it’s as if priorities can change over time.
Mad, Ted!
@Ciaran Foster: or money changes hands ?
Totally agree. I bought the book from Eoghan back in December as a present but could not stop reading it.. great eye opener when walking around any nature area and looking at our human shaped environment.
Bought the book. Eoghan knows what he is talking about, we should listen
Lord save us from this stuff, so we return good farmland to the so called wild bush,
I have known so called farmers like this and they were to lazy to work their land and produce food, this was their cop out for not working their inheritance farm,
The boyo who wrote this article seems like one of them.
@Ned: You sound bitter. Were they “to” lazy to learn to spell also?
Every day I read or hear about another demand from the “Green Agenda”. Previously I would have considered myself environmentally conscious but I have rapidly become less so due to the polarised views presented.
More tree planting, ditch fertiliser (go organic) , drop bovines and ovines 20% in favor of grains and vegetables. Pay farmers to do so. Targets met… Simple..and it will be done.
Folks, do yourselves a favour and read his book.
Great book, highly recommend!
I’ve no problem to pay farmers to rewind their farms
But let’s house the homeless fix our health first eh?
We should change our approach to land use. A farm should be an inclosed area where sheep / goat / cows won’t go outside to graze on every little tree sapling. Same for sikka deer that has gone out of control in recent years. Nature and biodiversity has no chance in this country atm.
There are 8 Billion people on this planet that have to be fed every day and this idiot wants us to grow weeds. Enough of this nonsense. No matter what we do on this little island it will make little or no difference to global warming. We’re not the cause of the problem, but we could help alleviate the consequences.
@Liam Dunne: well we are the cause of the problem, rich countries like ireland are the ones who consume the most and produce the most carbon per capita, we still contribute to the overall problem
@Liam Dunne: It’s not about global warming, it’s about biodiversity. Read the article, then try reading some books.
We need all houses to be carbon neutral…citizens deserve at least cheap/free heating.
I’ve noticed a lot of hedgerows getting torn out of grazing fields near me over the last 2-3 winters.
It makes little sense, the farmer only gains a few square meters of space. Then any farm animals in the fields lose shelter from the elements during wind, rain & heat.
And of course nature loses its last piece of wilderness on the edge of the field.
Is there some sort of subsidy to do this sort of work or why is it being done?
So you want us to pay farmers to not work on the least viable part of their land. Sure.
@Dan Dare: they would need money to maintain fences to keep deer, sheep & goats off the land while it recovers.
Kill an extra quarter of a million cows a year and rewild as much land as possible . What will people eat if this goes ahead ? And there is no point in saying that we export most of what we produce as if that makes its consumption somewhere else on the planet irrelevant
Unbelievable, I grew up in a large farming community. Farmers are so so wealthy. The new generation of farmers are splashing the cash, massive mansions, big 4×4′s, new cars etc. Some small farmers may struggle a little like the rest of us. But the cash the big dairy guys are rolling in is unbelievable!
have your say