Yesterday I spoke about the government’s Action Plan for Jobs.

Most of the companies that get grant funding have to submit a business plan before they get a penny of cash. It’s called good governance. If you want taxpayers’ hard-earned money, show us how you are going to splash that cash. It’s not just companies: the rules cover anybody applying for government money.

Irish Water has just published their business plan for the next 25 years. As it’s a major infrastructural project, it’s good that they are taking the long view. Let’s not knock them for that.

There are far more interesting things we need to talk about...

Let’s start by talking sh*t; to be more precise, the leaky treatment plants that are leaking the aforementioned material.

Irish water says that an inventory of such sites is on-going. Most of us think that Irish Water was a brand spanking new company that employed a whole gang of innocent engineers whose big break has just arrived. WRONG.

As is the wont of Irish public services, there was ‘redeployment’ of personnel.   County water engineers one day, Irish Water engineers the next. But here’s the thing... As County Water Engineers, wouldn’t those mighty engineers have had scraps of paper with the bad spots of leakage labelled on them?

Surely one meeting of all the new Irish Water engineers would have collated all those scraps of paper into one lovely map? At least they would have known where the problems were. Earlier.

It is a fair point they make when they argue that they are the victims of years of under-investment. The government has its prints over this.

It is obvious Irish Water will be chronically underfunded for the foreseeable future. The cart-before-horse water-metering strategy was hung out to dry once political fun and games started. There’s a flip side to the argument – using general taxation to fund water – but hey, would you like higher taxes?

It’s a mess.

I have no solution to be honest. Could we jump into a time machine and begin investing from the moment the EU began upping water standards? Well yes, but too late now.

To badly misquote Shakespeare, there may well be a plague on all our houses by the timespan of  this business plan.