Last week, Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly said that the €100 grant, which will be paid to households that have registered with Irish Water, could be used towards buying some of the devices available to conserve water, such as water butts, water displacement devices to reduce water flow in toilets or aerators to reduce water flow from taps."Water displacement devices"? Just fill a plastic bottle with water and put it in your cistern and - Voila - a "water displacement device" is born.
But Kelly's overall thrust it's what's really funny. People are going to get €100 from the Department of Social Welfare as a "thank you" gift from the government for actually bothering to register with Irish Water and Kelly suggests that people spend that €100 on things that can help conserve water.
That ranks up there with one of the stupidest, funniest things I've heard a politician say. People are going to get that €100 and spend it on food or clothes or pints of beer or bottles of wine or fuel for the car or on a night away or whatever. They're not going to designate that €100 as "water conservation" money. It'll be just money.
I'd love to have been looking at Kelly's face to see if he was saying this sheepishly, knowing he sounded like a moron, or with the confident arrogance of a politician who knows nothing or is indifferent to life in the real world. Either image of Minister Kelly is making me laugh. He should be redesignated Minister for Entertainment and drop the whole Environment thing.
Or maybe that comment is just an April Fool's & I missed it. Yeah that must be it.
