Lise Hand: Gormley tells schools to cut water bills by harvesting rain
In fairness, it was about time a Green TD caught a lucky break. Just as John Gormley arrived in the schoolyard for a photo shoot, the blue sky overhead went dark and the rain bucketed down. It was only hopping off the stones.
Now normally this would send a government minister's advisers and spin doctors and hairdresser (joking about the last one) into a right flap, but yesterday the deluge was serendipitous.
For the Environment Minister was in St Catherine's National School in Dublin 8 to launch a new wheeze for harvesting rainwater.
The school has teamed up with Kingspan Water to install a big blue barrel-shaped gizmo in the yard which will collect the product of every downpour and drizzle and use it for useful stuff like flushing all the toilets in the school.
And so John happily posed in the lashing rain with a group of giddy kiddies. Oh, they all had a right merry time of it under a load of umbrellas, messing about with watering-cans and an urn-full of sunflowers for the cameras.
The minister was overflowing himself with enthusiasm for the product -- St. Catherine's is the first school to acquire this new system. After all, schools all over the country are hard-pressed to pay the water charges which were introduced by, ehhh, the Fianna Fail/Green Government two years ago.
"Businesses and schools pay for water charges, so the burden is falling on schools," John Gormley agreed.
But a sunny John could see a bright side to the raincloud. "So that is why it's the intention of Government to introduce water charges on a metered basis for domestic uses as well.
"The technology here today is a way of allaying those costs -- you can save an awful lot of money if you invest in this technology," he enthused.
Sure all we have to do to save a few quid is just stick an auld barrel on the roof of the gaff and everything will be right as, ahem, rain.
But yesterday morning was full of wonders -- not only did a Green get a rub of green, weather-wise, but there was also the unusual spectacle of Mr Gormley endorsing a statement by the Fine Gael leader.
On Thursday Enda Kenny had declared that the most high-profile TV event of a general election campaign -- the leaders' debate between the Taoiseach and the leader of the opposition -- should also be thrown open to the other political parties' top bananas.
John was shoulder-to-shoulder with Enda on this matter.
"I think that's far better because in the past the two-horse race has been discriminatory, and you've seen that reflected in the results in the final week, smaller parties get squeezed," he said.
Nor did he just want Eamon Gilmore alone to be given a gallop. "If you expand it to three parties, all you're doing is making it a three-horse race and that is still discriminatory," he reckoned.
"It's far better if you have all of the candidates presenting their programmes and as a result of that the electorate can make their choice as to what's best for the country."
Marvellous. That's just what we need. A big roaring-match between the whole lot of them, live on the telly.
Honestly, it never rains but it pours.
Irish Independent
