Fifty million euros. It certainly sounds like an awful lot of money. But without a detailed account of how that money was spent it is impossible to say whether Irish Water has got value for money.
Just in case you’ve been under a rock for the last few days, the 50 million in question is the amount that Irish Water CEO John Tierney has said was spent on consultation in the first year of set up of the new water charging company.
As could have been predicted, this has sent many into a teeth-gnashing frenzy of criticism, with many refrains of back to the bad old days of Celtic Tiger governments, cronyism, preferment and clientalism. But before we get too far into this, let’s look at the actual detail extant.
First of all, let’s look at who has received monies. The companies named in the media are Accenture, Ernst and Young, IBM and Oracle, in no particular order (well all right then alphabetical for the pedantic). Tierney was quoted as saying that the money to these consultants had been spent on, among other things, advice in setting up IT systems for the likes of billing and customer service, financial management and asset management systems.
Now I have been a major critic of various governments here for their poor usage of IT in public services, with concepts such as taxing benefits as just the kind of oxymoron that characterises poor IT implementation.
So when I read the reports of spending money, albeit a large amount, to properly implement a system whereby smart meters will be able to report directly to a centralised body on resource usage, losses and other aspects of a modern water distribution system to facilitate the proper application of allowances and customer billing I thought that’s a good idea!
Because there’s hardly one among us who hadn’t thought, on hearing about water charging, that the system would be cumbersome, opaque and unfair — if it worked at all.
But thinking about it, it will require a fairly sophisticated asset management system to properly account for all of the infrastructure necessary for this new system as well as an intelligent data network to receive and process all the information, not to mention a very good billing system to ensure that people are only billed for what they use over and above their properly assigned free allowance.
All of that costs money — serious money, so why are we bemoaning the costs of what it takes to do this kind of thing properly?
Well the obvious answer is bitter experience, but I for one would take the expense if it means that we have a properly set up water utility that can manage an expensive resource in a fair and sustainable way, which let’s face it would be something of a first for this country.
I am not defending Irish Water, as the details of the spend need to be made public before anyone can really judge, but what I am saying is if the spend yields the desired results it was money well spent.
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