EU monitored State's excess water charges, with officials querying 'long delay'

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

59% : A senior official at the Department of Housing had said the charge aimed to encourage water conservation that would "ensure" Ireland's compliance with the EU water framework directive.
55% : One document read: "It should be also noted that the EU are monitoring the introduction of this charge with the query below from January 2025, 'Are IE [Ireland's] authorities finally implementing the 'excessive use' charges for domestic users of water services?
55% : In a note dated February 12th this year it was stated that once the regulations for exemptions were in place then they "can proceed with implementing household water conservation charge".
54% : The regulations underpinning exemptions to the charges were updated in 2023 and re-examined in 2025.
53% : The FOI documents also show a civil servant from the water services department said the EU was "monitoring" the charge and had asked about it in January.
50% : The Government said its position to upgrade Ireland's ailing water systems through general taxation remained unchanged.
48% : Housing Minister James Browne said he was not considering bringing in excessive use charges "at this time". Documents released under a Freedom of Information (FOI) request show civil servants in the Department of Housing were preparing the groundwork to introduce regulations that would allow for exemptions to excess water use charges.
45% : Taoiseach denied measure to conserve supplies was a return to unpopular bills The European Union was "monitoring" the introduction of excess water use charges in Ireland earlier this year and asked why there was such a long delay to their implementation, according to a Department of Housing official.
44% : Ireland is the only part of the EU that does not have metered water charges.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.