Irish Water Spend €400m On Counselling For Meter Installers

FIGURES leaked to WWN this morning have revealed that Irish Water spent an estimated €400 million on counselling services for meter installers since its inception.

The costs were attributed to the huge amount of negativity that IW workers have had to face on a daily basis, which required the company to hire several full-time counsellors to help their workers cope with the emotional distress.

Although meter installers were cited as the worst hit by abuse and workplace trauma, phone operators and spokespeople were also among those who signed up for the service, after reports that members of staff were starting to suffer symptoms of PTSD similar to those found in veterans of wars in the Middle East.

The counselling sessions, lasting anywhere from 30 minutes to five hours, are designed to assure the meter installers that they’re not ‘sellouts’, ‘scabs’, or ‘fucking traitors’, and to instead instill them with the confidence to go out every day and install meters in some of the most hostile working environments in the world.

“The time I spend in counselling every week really helps me face getting up and going to work in the morning,” said Fintan Drury, a meter installer currently working in the Cork city area.

“I can talk to the counsellor about everything, and they listen without judging. They assure me that I’m not some filthy parasite selling the lives of Irish citizens into more austerity; I’m just a plumber who took a job because I was unemployed. Then there’s tea and biscuits; I always take loads so I can have them for 10 o’clock break the next day. It’s all free”.

Irish Water has defended spending so much of the taxpayers’ money keeping its workforce happy and productive, stating that it’ll all pay off when the Irish water network is functioning at 100% with no leaks and no houses on boil notice, expected sometime in 2097.