'PR disaster'
The episode was a PR disaster, he said and a political debacle in terms of political administration and in terms of public confidence in the Irish civil service and political class to deal honestly with a problem.
Launching In Deep Water, a journalistic account of the matter, McDowell said that its author Michael Brennan is a very skilled and valued journalist and always acute yet fair in his observations of the political class.
“Michael Brennan has made a dramatic step forward in legal theory,” he said “because he has proved the truth of Murphy’s Law – that if something can go wrong, it will.
Mess
“The book shows how the Irish establishment grappled with an issue, made an almighty mess of it, and the political system completely failed,” McDowell said.
McDowell said that at the time of the launch of Irish Water, the Irish people felt that they were being asked to pay for events and misjudgements to which they were not party and for which they themselves were not to blame.
The seeds for this political failure were sown as the state hunted around for new ways to extract money from people, he said.
'Deep-rooted suspicion'
He said the public had a deep-rooted suspicion that there was a plan to take the water supply out of the national accounts, and also that there was a secret plan in government to privatise water supply and sell it off to wealthy people who had done very well out of the Irish economy in the past.
That suspicion led to a popular tide of revulsion against Irish Water, he said.
McDowell said that he had recently built a house in Roscommon and been part of a group water scheme. That experience made him realise that there were huge differentiations in the standard of water between city and country, and that infrastructure investment was necessary.
Irish water supply still needs a massive injection of public monies, he said but nothing substantial has been done about this.
“We have got to have a system whereby the water supply is funded, and those who use water domestically pay something towards it,” he said.
But all political parties in Dáil Eireann now feel themselves vulnerable to a popular wave of discontent about water and won't make progress on the issue.
Scholarship
He praised the book’s objectivity and scholarship in investigating, recording and remembering the circumstances of the Irish Water debacle, as he launched it at Dubray Books on Dublin's Grafton Street on 24 September.
“Michael Brennan has put in writing an account of a big failure in Irish political and administrative life,” he said.
It should be a signal lesson to those in politics and in the public service, he said.
The book is published by Mercier Press and is now on sale.