Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –
Wherever we go in the world a word we will quickly learn to speak in the language of our host country after hello, good-bye, please and thank you is water.
As we can’t live more than three or four days without fresh water one would think that we would take better care of what globally is a scarce resource and locally can swiftly become one. As an island people who are surrounded by water, whose terra firma has ample lakes and rivers and where we expect it to rain at almost any time to think of fresh water as scarce is counter-intuitive.
The facts speak for themselves which is that most of the world’s water is undrinkable without expensive technological intervention. This is because 96.5% of water is sea water and much of the remaining 3.5% of nominally fresh water as found in rivers and lakes is immediately unusable as we have poisoned it. Aquifers contain approximately 33% of fresh water of which, according to the Stockholm International Water Institute, a third are depleted and according to the UNEP a high proportion are severely polluted.
The cryosphere, which are glaciers, ice caps and permafrost, hold 70% of the Earth’s fresh water. While relatively unpolluted the cryosphere is rapidly melting because of global warming.
Although the human body is commonly thought to be composed of flesh and bones, 60% of our physique is water. Another interesting thing about this solvent is the first forms of life originated and evolved in water. We, like so many other life-forms, are water-infused.
Given that we are largely composed of water, are physically sustained by water, emerged from water and depend on it for a wide variety of activities including washing ourselves, our clothes, cleaning our homes and growing food it is not surprising that in ancient Ireland bodies of water were thought to have a divine origin and were regarded as sacred.
Lough Erne for instance, which is the fourth largest body of water in Ireland, is named after a woman called Érann. In Irish mythology there are three stories about the lough’s origin. One, which resonates with other mythological stories about the origins of Irish rivers and lakes, is that a mythical woman named Erne, who was Queen Meabh’s lady in-waiting, fled with two other women from Cruachan, County Roscommon in fear of a fearsome giant and on drowning their bodies dissolved to become Lough Erne.
The Rivers Bann, Boyne and Shannon are other bodies of water reputed in Irish mythology to have their origin in drowned mythical women signifying their divinity. In spite of the mythology attached to our waterways, and our dependence upon them, we treat them as open sewers. Northern Ireland Water (NI Water) certainly does by the regular release of sewage into them as we know to be the case with Lough Erne, Lough Neagh and Strangford Lough.
NI Water are thought to be responsible for 24% of water pollution, agriculture 62% and septic tanks 12%. Another source of pollution is run-off from roads. As NI Water is a government owned company we the tax payers are the shareholders and can lobby our politicians to ensure that it treats our waterways in a way that enhances their ecological health which means not treating them as part of the sewage network. To do this it needs adequate funding which means that the public should be asked to pay the money required. The payment would not be a give-away but an investment in our wellbeing, that of our offspring and our entire bioregion.
This idea of paying more for our water is supported by the independent watchdog the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council, which in a report in early June said that “The fundamental constraint on NI Water is a budgetary one”. In wanting to retain favour with the electorate the two major political parties in the Executive are opposed to direct water charges.
A similar situation exists in the Republic of Ireland where the water authority, Uisce Eireann, is a public body and the government plans to charge households only for excessive use which is 1.7 % above the average household amount of 125,000 litres.
In both jurisdictions, where the major source of water pollution is agriculture, the farming community, as represented by their unions, is dead-set against making the types of changes that will result in the elimination of nutrients and chemicals that are harmful to aquatic life. These include reducing the size of the dairy herd, better slurry management, creating buffer zones around waterways, planting native trees to prevent soil erosion and ensuring medicines given to animals don’t enter the water system.
To this end governments need to ensure that farms are economically viable.
It is a case of the authorities joining the dots and recognising that clean water is the basis of a healthy ecosystem, thriving and ecologically sustainable farms, is essential to building new homes and providing jobs across the economy including in outdoor pursuits which enhance physical and mental wellbeing.
There is a need for close cross-border cooperation on water quality and other eco-issues as we live a single bioregion with many bodies of water straddling the political border. Lough Melvin with its waters at one and the same time in County Fermanagh and County Leitrim is an example of this. The bio-rich waters of Lough Erne flow through County Fermanagh and into the sea at Ballyshannon in County Donegal.
The fact that farming families have an invested interest in passing on ecologically viable farms to their descendants gives us hope that regenerative farming will be embraced. A delay in doing so serves no one’s interests.
To treat our bodies of water with the respect they deserve, as something precious, would be in keeping with the ancient belief that water is sacred. For us in our homes and places of work this means not letting the tap run, reporting leaks and not flushing sanitary products down the toilet.
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