THE Government will make its third attempt next week to eliminate water charges from the political agenda for the general election.

For the third time in three months, the Minister for the Environment, Mr Howlin, is preparing to produce a package designed to kill off a controversy which, initially, threatened the urban vote and is now shaping up as a major rural issue in the election.

The National Federation of Group Water Schemes, chaired by Mr Bernard Keeley, will decide tomorrow at a national rally in Athlone whether to run candidates on a water-charges ticket in rural constituencies.

With 150,000 rural households, mostly in the west and north-west, dependent on group water schemes and 170 such schemes already affiliated to the federation, the strong intervention by Mr Keeley, its national chairman, has spurred the Fine Gael element in Coalition into urgent action.

The latest problem to inflict the three-party Coalition - hitting Fine Gael hardest, once again - results from the Minister's pre-Christmas announcement of the intention to abolish water and sewage charges from January 1st, and substitute car-tax funding for the local authorities.

With Democratic Left and urban dwellers claiming a victory Mr Howlin, apparently unknowingly, unleashed a huge rural backlash from households depending on group water schemes.

These schemes have been established over the years in a number of townlands in rural Ireland where a developer often wants to build housing in areas not covered by the local authority's mains supply. A capital grant is offered to the household towards the installation costs and a yearly charge of £100 or so is paid for supply.

There are 85,000 households in group schemes sourced from local authorities supplies; 50,000-60,000 households in group schemes with their own source of supply; and up to 130,000 with private individual supplies.

With claims of urban-rural inequality rising from the west, Mr Howlin moved to dampen the rural controversy when he made his second water charges announcement on January, 21st.

In an £18 million package for 1997, £3 million of it financed by the EU, he announced that local authorities would no longer charge group schemes for the supply of domestic water; a special financial provision of £5 million a year to establish a new programme of works to enable local authorities to take over existing group water and sewage schemes; and a new system of capital block grants to enable local authorities to determine and carry out their own programme for small water and sewage schemes, including group water schemes, in their areas.

The current campaign aims to abolish the annual charge for the supply of water, ostensibly to bring rural schemes into line with their urban counterparts. Mr Howlin is finalising proposals to deal with this third phase of the water charges controversy this weekend.