Paul Malpas

My Grandad Part 3 will have to wait until tomorrow, matters of a more urgent nature are pressing on my mind and they will give me no peace until they are indented on the printed page.

At this moment I have to say I am scared, it is 3.00am on a very sub-zero morning, the world around me sleeps but I cannot.  I am torn in two with exasperation at the way small town Ireland works.  I will explain, although I am scared, because a month ago I asked a question of small town Ireland, an innocent question I thought and got bitten so severely it spoilt my Christmas.  So I will tread carefully and try to put my puerile thoughts in front of you without hopefully upsetting half the population.

There is a small estate of less than a dozen houses in the west of Ireland, set out in crescent formation, possibly designed by that ally of friend and foe alike, Mr Osama bin Laden.  All houses have the full works, underfloor central heating, double glazing, four or five bedrooms, garages, manicured lawns, architecturally designed landscaped gardens and knocking out at around €400,000 when I came round the corner, four years ago.  Everything is too ordered, too manufactured, nature has not been allowed to flourish but it is, all the same, the full Monty.  If there was one small word to sum up the estate it would be twee, it certainly lacks a little of that inner suburban chaos that I know and love, but twee would be wrong because of the dark secrets it holds.

It is peopled by all ranks of the upper social scale, with the lowly out of work writer at one end, through small buisness owners, professionals, mental health consultants, banking gurus, to our leader, a purveyor of justice, a man who knows right from wrong, but we are all bound up in small town Ireland and we are all scared to speak our mind.

The dark secret or problem is the developer and builder of the estate and the Local Authority, the two fine arbiters of fair play in this neck of the woods.  This particular problem amongst other problems is that every time the weather drops below freezing, the individual house water supply pipes freeze up leaving certain houses with no water.  The house next to the one I am sitting in has been frozen up for a week and this is the fourth time in six years this burden has been levied on this family.  No water!  This is not the Nubian desert, this is Ireland and the West to boot, there is water everywhere, but it aint coming out of the taps. Now, with this sustained spell of freezing weather there are only about 40% of the houses with a properly working plumbing system and, so I am told, it takes four days after the thaw for the underground pipes to feel the benefit which means these houses could be without water for well over two weeks.  A health and safety problem waiting to unfurl.

This malfunction is entirely due to the fact that the developer when building the houses ten years ago did not abide by good building practice and must have laid the water mains on the ground and laid the tarmacadam finish over the top, instead of digging trenches and laying the pipes within.  Some of the stop taps are no more than 150 to 250mm deep.  We  are perhaps lucky in that this house was built with the developer’s brother in mind and the incoming water main certainly at the stop tap is about 450mm deep which makes it temporarily acceptable.  A quick check on good building practice via my Mitchell’s Advanced Building Construction 1963 Revised Edition, on page 180 tells me that all water mains should be at a “minimum of 2’6” depth” or to put it into the modern idiom 750mm deep.

So there we are 60% of us are in the Sahara, the builder has cocked up, it is ten years since the houses were built.  The Local Authority have put in the street lighting system and they take care of our sewage through the pumping station beyond and they manage our domestic waste.  Let us go to the council who will soon sort out this shoddy mess.

Problem!  Although it is ten years since the houses went on the market, the Local Authority have still not legally adopted the estate despite providing all the aforesaid services.  You would think that adoption was admitted by these actions alone without considering the time frame, but they are adamant and in the meanwhile poor Joe suffers.

It seems that when the builder commenced the scheme, he had to put down a deposit or initiate a legal bond to ensure proper completion of the works to the satisfaction of the Local Authority.  To ensure that workmanship is kept to a high standard, a local firm of Engineers or Architects are employed to regularly inspect the works.  This safe guard seems to have failed along with the builder’s contractual responsibilities in this case, because on completion the Authority examined the works, considered themselves unhappy with certain aspects and produced a snag list for the builder to correct.  Unfortunately the list of defects issued by the council proved to be too onerous for the builder, who has ignored his duties in the matter and obviously after ten years allowed the council to retain the deposit or call in the bond.  This snag list whatever it contains is still in existence, the builder cannot afford to put right the defects, the council will not sign off.  Stalemate– ten years of stalemate whilst the builder has been allowed to continue building houses and properties for the council and the population at large.  It would not happen anywhere in Europe.  In the meantime, we, the lowly customer, the bottom of the heap, is once more kicked up the arse and told to shut up by small town Ireland.  Our poor in-house legal eagle has to take his burgeoning family a few miles down the road to bathe and attend to matters of personal privacy denied by this philosophy,  our financial guru cannot wait to get to work so that he can wallow in 21st century luxury and our mental health consultant is threatening on sucking the Boyle River dry to service his growing hydrological need.

So where do we go to end this stalemate, our legal team have studied the case and decided that there is no redress in this matter.  This is small town Ireland and it would not be right to damage the sphincter of the man who has just hung you out to dry, and nobody can put pressure on the Local Authority because small town Ireland is about not putting pressure on anybody and letting the status quo and malfeasance wash all round us.

However there is one ray of hope.  The council have a legal obligation, Duty of Care, as they call it nowadays, to ensure the Health and Safety of its population, to deny we twees this basic right and this right was confirmed in 19th century legislation is only what you would expect from our benign governing fathers, just like we would expect our Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church to protect our innocent children.  The fact that there is no water supply to a property is surely a health risk.  Surely our local attorney must know some pettifogger in say New Zealand, at least someone far enough away to put this situation to rights before the long scrawny arm of small town Ireland circumnavigates the world to punch him or her in the face.

But why should I care, I have got water on tap.  I am all right Jack thank you very much.